Grants and Writing Resources for Lakehead University

A Lakehead clinical psychology student was chosen as one of 20 national finalists in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's 2026 Storytellers Challenge, the university reported in May 2026. Her video describes the alienation Indigenous young people can feel as they adapt to life away from their communities. Her master's research looks at how to adapt Aaniish Naa Gegii, a mental health measure first designed for Indigenous youth aged 8 to 18, for Indigenous postsecondary students, working with Lakehead's Indigenous Student Service Centre. She was set to begin the university's PhD in Clinical Psychology in September 2026.

Where Students Present

Undergraduates in every faculty can enter the Rita Nicholas Undergraduate Research Conference, a peer-judged event held each year during Research and Innovation Week. Students give a poster or an oral presentation. The top vote-getters in each faculty, in both categories, are invited to lunch with the university president to talk about their research.

Graduate students have two short-format contests. The Three Minute Thesis is for thesis-based students, who explain their work in three minutes or less with one static slide. GRADflix asks for a 60-second creative video about the research, can be entered at any stage of a degree, and carries a cash prize. The 2026 winners list also shows Graduate Studies Research Excellence Awards for PhD students in natural sciences and engineering and in social sciences and humanities, plus graduate poster prizes in engineering and in NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR categories.

Scholarships and Bursaries

Returning undergraduates apply for in-course scholarships, awards and bursaries through the myAwards portal. Scholarships reward academic achievement, awards weigh merit and financial need together, and bursaries rest on need shown in a budget form. In-course status means full-time registration in both the current and the previous academic year.

For graduate students, most internal scholarships, bursaries and awards are made by individual programs on academic promise and financial need. Term graduate bursaries in fall, winter and spring/summer are open to full-time students in any discipline who show financial need and are Canadian citizens or landed immigrants who have lived in Ontario for at least twelve consecutive months. The Graduate Student Professional Development Bursary, with the same citizenship and residency terms, helps with conference presentations and other academic activities, and the application has to go in before the event.

Graduate Assistantships

Some full-time graduate students, international students included, hold graduate assistantships. In 2025-26 an appointment paid $11,314.28 at the master's level and $12,338.50 at the doctoral level. A regular appointment runs to a maximum of 270 hours over the fall and winter terms, an average of no more than 10 hours a week. The work is academic support: teaching or leading seminars, supervising labs, marking, holding office hours and leading field trips.

Writing Help and the Thesis

The Student Success Centre's Academic Support Zone offers one-to-one writing support through its Academic Writing Coach Services. Writing Coaches help students with research questions, literature reviews, structure, argument and logical flow, and with building self-editing and proofreading skills. The centre says the appointments are designed to teach and augment writing skills. Upper-year peer mentors lead a Writing Study Club, and an Elements of Style module on D2L covers sentence structure, grammar and punctuation.

The Faculty of Graduate Studies sets out the master's thesis process from examiner forms through the oral defence. The final copy goes in as a PDF/A file, unlocked, without password protection or signatures, along with a Licence to the University form for the library. An embargo can be requested. Lakehead theses and dissertations are held in the Electronic Theses and Dissertations community of Knowledge Commons, the university's open access repository.

Once examiner revisions are made and the final PDF is close, our editors can check grammar, consistency and format. See our Lakehead University dissertation and thesis editing and Lakehead University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• The Secret to Better Grades: Starting Your Writing Process Early
• The Literature Review: Avoiding Intellectual Overwhelm
• Dissertation Defense: Defending the Logical Skeleton