Grants and Writing Resources for Stephen F. Austin State University

In February 2026 an SFA biology graduate student reached the finals of the Three Minute Thesis competition of the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools. She was one of 12 finalists from a field of 66 master's and doctoral students, with a talk titled "The Dolphin Cocktail Party Effect: Did You Whistle My Name?" A month later the Sylvans timbersports team won its eighth straight Southern Forestry Conclave with 342.75 points, the highest total in the event's history.

Conferences and the 3MT

The Undergraduate Research Conference is an annual competition run through the Center for Student Research and Creative Discovery. It takes submissions from undergraduates in SFA's six colleges and from other East Texas colleges and universities. A committee of professors selects the program. In 2026 seven top scholars give presentations or performances, and the finalists present posters.

Graduate students have two venues. The Graduate Research Conference takes 10- to 12-minute papers and posters, accepts work in progress or a selected portion of a thesis, and gives Dean's Research Awards to the top papers and posters. SFA's 3MT competition is open to master's and doctoral students. For 2026 it offers first place a $1,000 scholarship plus travel and admission to the regional round, the runner-up a $500 scholarship, and the People's Choice winner a $250 grant toward a conference of the student's choice.

Travel Money

Students presenting research they authored, as a talk or a poster, can apply for conference funding from the Center for Student Research and Creative Discovery. The application asks for the abstract and the letter of acceptance. In 2023-24 the center offered 14 awards a semester, with no more than two students per college, and it reviews requests until the money runs out.

Several colleges keep separate student funds. The Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture has developmental funds for undergraduate research and professional meeting travel. The Perkins College of Education takes travel requests backed by a faculty mentor, and in the Micky Elliot College of Fine Arts the request goes to the dean.

Writing Prizes and HUMID

The Department of English and Creative Writing gives cash prizes in its Literary and Writing Awards, with one winner and up to two honorable mentions per category. Graduate Literary Analysis takes a 3,500- to 3,700-word essay from graduate coursework. Undergraduate Literary Analysis takes 1,500 to 3,200 words from a 300- or 400-level SFA literature course. Creative writing majors and minors enter fiction, poetry or nonfiction, and there are separate categories for professional writing and for essays from ENGL 1301 and 1302. Most categories are judged blind.

HUMID is the student-produced undergraduate literary magazine. It comes out once a year and prints fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, art and photography by current SFA undergraduates.

Tutors, Theses and Dissertations

Writing tutors at the Academic Assistance and Resource Center in Steen Library cover all undergraduate writing courses at walk-in tables, and weekly online appointments can be booked when offered for a specific course. They work on brainstorming, audience, sentence structure and grammar, and the center states that tutoring does not include editing a paper. The Online Writing Lab in Brightspace gives a personalized review of any paper, and a writing graduate assistant meets graduate students by request. The Office of Research and Graduate Studies also links to Dissemity, an AI-powered writing platform that walks users through peer-reviewed articles and the writing conventions of a discipline.

The same office's guides for the master's thesis and dissertation require a mechanically correct draft, and a manuscript that misses the specifications can be returned for correction. The guides say the student bears the primary responsibility for quality. The final version is uploaded to ScholarWorks pending the office's approval. Each department may nominate one thesis a year for the William R. Johnson Outstanding Thesis Award, judged on the originality of the research and the quality of the writing; the winner is named in the May commencement program.

A thesis also has to meet the graduate office's mechanical specifications, and our editors can read it first for grammar, consistency and format. See our Stephen F. Austin State University dissertation and thesis editing and Stephen F. Austin State University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write a Literature Essay: Mastering Close Reading
• Writing the Abstract and Title: First Impressions Matter
• Escaping the Revision Pile: Strategies for First-Round Approval