Grants and Writing Resources for Fayetteville State University

Three Fayetteville State seniors who graduated in spring 2026 left with national research honors from the 2026 Emerging Researchers National Conference in Atlanta, which the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Foundation hosted with 400 presentations and more than 700 participants. A computer science graduate and Navy veteran placed first in the Computer Science and Information Management oral presentation category for an AI project that helps detect pneumonia in children's chest X-rays. She begins a doctoral program in computer science at Johns Hopkins University this fall. A chemistry major took second place in Nanoscience and Materials Science oral presentations for work on supercapacitor materials, and a computer science major placed second in posters with an AI assistant that searches NASA's Planetary Data System in natural language.

Where Undergraduates Present and Publish

Any FSU undergraduate can submit an abstract to the Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, as long as a faculty member or a professional in the field supervised the research. Presenters give a 15-minute oral talk with questions, moderated by a faculty member, or present a poster to visitors during a one-hour session. The program also has keynote talks, performing arts demonstrations and displays of creative work. Each selected presenter is recognized individually.

Symposium papers may be considered for STREAMS, the FSU Journal for Undergraduate Research and Creative Works. It is an online, open access journal (ISSN 2577-7521) that takes original research and creative work from any FSU undergraduate, joint student and faculty work included, and every submission goes through blind review. Volume 1 appeared in spring 2019 and Volume 2 that fall.

Symposium Prizes and Scholarships

The university holds an annual Student Research Symposium. In 2024 FSU held the third annual symposium on May 1 at the Rudolph Jones Student Center. Eighty-six students presented research in STEM, education, business, the performing and creative arts, and the social sciences. A judge picked first, second and third place, and each winner received a cash award between $100 and $300.

The fourth symposium met on April 11, 2025, again at the Rudolph Jones Student Center, and drew 140 participants, 51 of them student presenters. Oral and poster winners took $300 for first place, $200 for second and $100 for third. A new Excellence in Research award of $500 went to the top poster from the Lloyd College of Health, Science, and Technology. Sponsors that year included the U.S. Department of Education HBCU Master's Degree Phase II Grant and the FSU Honors Program.

For institutional scholarships, FSU uses one General Scholarship Application that makes a student eligible for many awards at once, and students search and apply through ScholarshipUniverse. Awards fall into academic, talent-based, need-based, and community and group scholarships, and each scholarship sets separate criteria. The Military Tuition Scholarship has a separate application.

McNair Scholars

The McNair Scholars Program is a federally funded TRiO program of the U.S. Department of Education, run at more than 150 institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico. At FSU it takes full-time undergraduates (12 units or more) who are first-generation students with financial need or underrepresented minority students, and who are committed to earning a PhD in any discipline.

Each scholar works one-on-one with a faculty mentor on a research project and is paid a stipend for completing it and taking part in the program. Scholars live at FSU during the summer. The program runs GRE and graduate school preparation workshops, and scholars receive fee waivers for more than 200 graduate schools.

Graduate Funding and Thesis Awards

The Graduate School's professional development page covers graduate funding. Limited graduate assistantships open in fall, spring and summer; students apply to the Graduate Assistant Pool, and academic units hire from it. Each college also awards limited graduate tuition assistance and picks recipients and amounts on academic performance, financial need, recruitment and retention. The page names assistantship and tuition assistance contacts in each of the four colleges.

Graduate students also register for the Student Research Symposium with an online abstract. FSU typically selects three graduate students for Graduate Education Day in Raleigh to meet legislators, and limited travel and registration funding may be available for the North Carolina Council of Graduate Schools conference. Thesis and doctoral students can be nominated for the CHBGS ProQuest Award from the Council of Historically Black Graduate Schools, and students may be eligible for nomination for the Master's Thesis award of the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools.

Writing Help and Theses

Professional and peer tutors staff the Writing & Communication Center, which helps with essays, academic research, creative writing, case studies, citations, cover letters and resumes at any stage. The center is in Room 216-B on the second floor of the Helen T. Chick Building. Appointments run 30 minutes to an hour, in person or in Upswing's Virtual Learning Classroom, and students book by phone at 910-672-1033, in person, or through Upswing in the FSU Engage Portal or Canvas. Graduate students can ask the center about in-person and virtual help with graduate-level writing.

Finished theses and dissertations are collected in the ETD Collection for Fayetteville State University on DigitalCommons@Fayetteville State University, a service of the university libraries. The collection lists work by year from 1996 through 2023, and many of the titles are education studies, especially on school leadership.

Before a thesis, dissertation or class paper goes to a committee or to STREAMS, our editors can give it a final edit for grammar, consistency and format. Visit our Fayetteville State University dissertation and thesis editing and Fayetteville State University essay editing pages, or email editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• The Secret to Better Grades: Starting Your Writing Process Early
• The Results Chapter: Presenting Data with Forensic Clarity
• The Literature Review: Avoiding Intellectual Overwhelm