Grants and Writing Resources for Temple University
For the second year running, three Temple students were named Goldwater Scholars. The April 2026 group, all juniors in the Class of 2027, came from the College of Science and Technology and the College of Liberal Arts and was chosen among 454 students nationwide in the program's 40th year. One tracks the temporary freshwater pools a rare 2021 tornado left in a forest. Temple had never before produced back-to-back cohorts of that size.
Grants for Undergraduate Projects
The Creative Arts, Research and Scholarship program, known as CARAS, makes about 50 awards a year. About 20 are Project Grants of up to $4,000, divided among supplies, travel and a student stipend, for a research or creative project supervised by a full-time Temple faculty mentor. The project ends in a product suited to the field, such as a paper, exhibit or film, along with a two- to three-page summary for general readers. The other 30 or so are Travel Grants of up to $1,000 for students presenting at a conference. Recipients must be full-time undergraduates, each grant is limited to one award per academic year, and the Office of the Provost and the student's school or college share the cost.
Diamond Research Scholars spend ten full-time summer weeks on a mentored project and finish it in a fall research or independent study course. The stipend was $4,000 in summer 2025. Applicants must be full-time undergraduates entering their sophomore year or later, with a cumulative GPA of at least 3.25.
Symposiums and the Three Minute Thesis
Each spring the Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creativity, formerly TURF-CreWS, takes oral and poster presentations from every school and college. Acceptance is competitive, the work has to be finished, and a Temple faculty member must endorse it. Diamond Scholars submit revised versions of their projects to it.
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars bring posters to the Graduate Symposium, where reviewers give feedback and presenters may be considered for travel grants. The Graduate School's 3MT Competition asks for a three-minute account of a research project for a lay audience. Competitors go through communication training and mock presentations first, scholarship awards go to the winners, and the first-prize winner goes on to the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools competition.
Fellowships, Completion Grants and Thesis Prizes
Students and recent alumni applying for national awards such as the Goldwater, Truman or Fulbright can get one-on-one advising and workshops from Scholar Development and Fellowships Advising.
At the graduate level, departments nominate newly admitted doctoral and MFA students for the Presidential and University Fellowships, which pay a stipend and tuition for at least four years of doctoral study. The Doctoral Dissertation Completion Grant is for candidates with only the dissertation left who are expected to finish and defend in the semester of application. It brings a stipend, single-coverage health insurance and one tuition credit, and recipients give up other Temple funding from then on. In the Creative Writing MFA, the Frances Tebet Israel Prize goes each year to the best master's thesis in poetry and in fiction. Students in the same program can take a literary editing course run with Barrelhouse magazine and produce an online issue with their names on the masthead.
Writing Help and Dissertation Filing
The Writing Center, run by the Student Success Center in Charles Library 230, is free to every enrolled undergraduate and graduate student. Tutors work in English and Spanish at any stage of a draft. They say they are less concerned about "fixing" the paper and more invested in teaching solid writing techniques. Graduate students can also sign up for writing and research retreats. They run from two-hour Just Write! sessions on Zoom to two-week retreats where faculty mentors read drafts.
Format rules are in the Graduate School's Dissertation and Thesis Handbook, last revised in November 2025. It requires a manuscript free of spelling and typographical errors. Submission through Temple's ETD Administrator site is mandatory, and the PDF goes to Charles Library for TUScholarShare. The Graduate School releases it to ProQuest once a signed permission form is in. A dissertation can be embargoed for up to two years on request.
The handbook asks for a manuscript with no spelling or typographical errors, and our editors can check a dissertation, thesis or essay for those along with consistency and format before it goes to ETD Administrator. See our Temple University dissertation and thesis editing and Temple 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 Temple University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your Temple writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.