Grants and Writing Resources for Fordham University

For the third year in a row, two Fordham undergraduates have won Goldwater Scholarships, the national award for undergraduates pursuing STEM research. The 2026 scholars, a biochemistry junior and an engineering physics junior, will each receive up to $7,500. Both have published in national research journals, and together they have given seven presentations at national and regional conferences. With 15 Fulbright awardees in 2024-2025, Fordham was again recognized as a Top Producing Institution, the Office of Fellowship Advising reports.

Research Grants and the Symposium

Since 2008 Fordham College at Rose Hill has awarded more than $2 million in undergraduate research funding, and nearly 1,000 students have received grants. Undergraduate Research Grants support projects during the academic year. Travel Grants help students present their research at professional conferences. In the Summer Research Program, students from all majors, rising sophomores and up, spend eight weeks on research with a faculty mentor.

The college's annual Undergraduate Research Symposium invites undergraduates from all majors and programs to present original work. For publication, the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal is a student-run journal of peer-reviewed undergraduate research.

Prizes for Essays and Poems

Any Fordham student may enter three of the English Department prizes for creative writing: the Reid Family Prize of $500, the Academy of American Poets Prize of $100 and the Margaret Lamb/Writing to the Right-Hand Margin Prizes, also $100. Rose Hill seniors compete for the Bernice Kilduff White & John J. White Creative Writing Prize.

Critical writing has its prizes too. The English Alumni Prize takes a Rose Hill senior's term paper of about 5,000 words, with no restriction on subject. The Charles J. Donahue Prize is open to Rose Hill seniors and English graduate students and usually goes to work in Old and Middle English or modern British literature. The graduating English major with the highest grade point average receives the $1,000 Margaret Amassian Award.

Fellowships and Graduate Funding

Students looking for outside money for research, service, study abroad or graduate school can start with the Office of Fellowship Advising. Its advisers help with the search, read essay drafts and run interview preparation, and faculty can refer students directly.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences awards four Distinguished Fellowships. Doctoral candidates apply for the Alumni Dissertation Fellowship once the department has accepted the proposal and the dean has approved the dissertation title and committee. The Research Fellowship supports students developing dissertation research with faculty mentors, and the Senior Teaching Fellowship goes to students with a record of excellent teaching. Summer Research Fellows spend the summer on fellowship proposals, articles and conference papers and then present at the annual GSAS Student Research Weekend. GSAS also offers the Mary Magdalene Fellowship with Impact for summer scholarship on women in Christianity.

At the department level, the History Department's graduate funding page lists the O'Connell Travel Grant for M.A. and Ph.D. students whose research requires archival work abroad or elsewhere in the U.S. It also points to Graduate Student Association research support grants for conference participation and research.

The Writing Center and GSAS Theses

The Writing Center is free to all Fordham affiliates, with rooms in Walsh Library at Rose Hill and Quinn Library at Lincoln Center. Appointments are in person or by synchronous online video, and online sessions can be booked with any tutor regardless of campus. Writers working toward a long-term goal can ask the director for standing appointments with the same tutor.

The GSAS thesis and dissertation rules in the 2026-2027 Fordham Bulletin call for a master's thesis committee of a director and at least one reader, all full-time faculty in the student's department or program. The thesis follows the format in Appendix E of the GSAS Academic Policies and Procedures Guidebook and is uploaded to ProQuest/UMI in its final version, with the committee's required changes. Doctoral students finish with an oral defense and presentation of the dissertation to the dean. Fordham dissertations and theses are collected in Fordham Research Commons.

If your thesis is headed to ProQuest or your essay to a prize committee, our editors can give it a final edit for grammar, consistency and format. See our Fordham University dissertation and thesis editing and Fordham University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write a Literature Essay: Mastering Close Reading
• Treating the Personal Statement as a Scholarly Defense
• ProQuest Readiness: The Final Mechanical Audit