Grants and Writing Resources for Oakland University
In January 2025 an Oakland doctoral student in educational leadership was honored at the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting in Washington, D.C., as a recipient of the 2025 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, given to graduate students who show promise as leaders in higher education. That spring a human movement science doctoral student won OU's Three Minute Thesis competition for the second time and went on to represent the university at the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools regional round.
Provost Research Awards
The Research Office and a cross-disciplinary committee of OU faculty administer the Provost Student Research Awards, with a single round of awards for 2026-2027. Undergraduates can receive up to $1,500 for the costs of an independent project carried out with a faculty mentor. Graduate students apply in one of four tracks: science, quantitative social engineering, engineering and mathematics; music, theatre and dance; qualitative social sciences; or the humanities. Each graduate track also pays up to $1,500, for research or creative work under a mentor.
A student may send two applications in a round, but only one can be funded in a given year. Recipients file a short final report listing the publications and presentations that came out of the award.
Graduate Prizes and Fellowships
The Graduate School's Graduate Dissertation and Thesis Awards pay $1,000 for a Ph.D. dissertation and $750 for a master's thesis. Up to two dissertation awards and one thesis award go out each year, with faculty choosing one STEM and one non-STEM winner, and the money helps offset the cost of producing the finished document.
Talks are judged too. In the Three Minute Thesis competition and Graduate Student Showcase, a master's or doctoral student explains an original research project in three minutes with one static slide. For the 2027 event, each heat winner receives $250 and the champion $1,000; the Showcase champion also receives $1,000. The Graduate School also holds a peer-reviewed Graduate Student Research Conference, where entry starts with an abstract of no more than 2,000 characters.
For students headed toward college teaching, the Martin Luther King Jr.-Dolores Huerta-Morris Hood Jr.-Rosa Parks (KHHP) Future Faculty Fellowship, created by the Michigan Legislature in 1986, pays tuition for academically or economically disadvantaged graduate students. Fellows agree to serve at least three years in postsecondary teaching or an approved administrative post.
Undergraduate Writing and Honors Theses
The Department of Writing and Rhetoric's Writing Excellence Awards are open to undergraduates with work from WRT courses. Each category winner receives $200 and a place in the Writing Excellence Awards book. Categories run from first-year analytical and research essays to professional writing, digital media and the Marshall Kitchens Creative Nonfiction Award.
Students in the Donna and Walt Young Honors College complete a thesis or creative project, starting with a proposal in HC 3900, and discuss it at the Research Festival. The college's prestigious scholarships coordinator advises on Fulbright, Marshall, Rhodes, Truman and Goldwater applications, with help on personal statements, grant proposals and interviews.
Writing Help and Thesis Submission
The Oakland University Writing Center works out of the Joan Rosen Writing Studio in 212 Kresge Library and is open to OU students, faculty and staff in every discipline. Its graduate services include faculty and graduate student staff who help compose theses and dissertations and report statistics, Dissertation 101 workshops on IRBs and grant proposals, and Sit Down and Write! mini-retreats for drafting proposals, theses and articles.
Before the defense, thesis and dissertation writers contact the Graduate School's Format Team by email, and the finished document has to meet every requirement in the school's formatting guide. Once format approval arrives, OU requires all theses and dissertations to be published through ProQuest, and authors may delay release for up to one year. Printed copies are optional.
If your thesis is headed to the Format Team or your paper is due soon, our editors can give it a final check for grammar, consistency and format. Visit our Oakland University dissertation and thesis editing and Oakland University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with Oakland University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your OU writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.