Grants and Writing Resources for Tennessee Technological University
Two Tennessee Tech chemistry student groups won American Chemical Society awards for the 2025-2026 academic year. The Student Members of the American Chemical Society chapter received Outstanding and Green Chemistry awards. The ACS Graduate Student Organization, one of 45 such groups nationally and one of two in Tennessee, earned an Outstanding award in its second chartered year.
Grants for Undergraduate Projects
The Office of the Provost runs URECA (Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity) for students working with a faculty mentor. URECA Mini Grants pay up to $1,000 for expenses and supplies, with no wages, and give preference to first- and second-year students. URECA Team Grants go up to $5,000, favor multi-student teams, and can include academic-year stipends. Both require full-time enrollment and good academic standing.
ELEVATE XP Travel Grants help individual students or groups present research or creative work at conferences, exhibitions and symposia. Applicants need the Gold Career Readiness Certificate at the time they apply.
Where Students Present and Publish
The Research and Creative Inquiry Symposium is open to undergraduate and graduate students in every department; in 2026 it ran three days in Memorial Gym. Two judges score each poster, and winners are picked department by department, with separate selections for undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. work. Papers written for English courses are presented in 12- to 15-minute talks and judged on an English Department form. Students who opt in see their abstracts and posters published in the online Proceedings of Student Research and Creative Inquiry Day.
The Iris Review is the student-edited literary magazine, printed once a year in spring. It takes poetry, fiction, screenplays, essays, comics and art from students, faculty, alumni and community members in the Upper Cumberland. English students also read submissions for Under the Sun, a creative nonfiction journal that began at Tennessee Tech in 1996, either as volunteers or in a credited internship supervised by creative writing faculty.
Prizes and Graduate Funding
The English Department's writing contests include the Clara Cox Epperson Prose Writing Competition and the Lora A. Printz Memorial Poetry Prize, both open to any Tennessee Tech student. English majors can also apply for the William W. Jenkins Creative Writing Scholarship.
For graduate students, the Eagle Empower Graduate Scholars Fellowship pays tuition, fees and a stipend at the department's rate in return for about 20 hours a week of research, support or teaching. A part-time version pays tuition and fees with no department service. Graduate Studies states that it is not accepting fellowship applications at this time, with awards made through Summer 2026. Beyond U.S. citizenship or permanent residence, applicants must meet one further criterion, such as first-generation graduate status or an undergraduate degree from an HBCU or HSI. Departments and centers also fund teaching and research assistantships, held by about one in three graduate students.
Writing Help and the Thesis Review
The Writing Excellence Studio @ Tech (WEST) in Henderson Hall 306B offers free one-on-one consultations for anything from freshman composition papers to doctoral dissertations and job materials. Sessions last 30 or 60 minutes, in person or on Zoom or Teams, and students may book up to one hour a week.
Finished theses and dissertations go to the College of Graduate Studies as PDFs through ProQuest's ETD Administrator. Reviewers there check for correct and consistent formatting and may point out a misspelling or a wrong tense along the way. APA 7 is the default style, with LaTeX and Manuscript styles also approved, and the thesis and dissertation pages cover each part of the document, from the title page to the vita.
Our editors give papers, theses and dissertations a final edit for grammar, consistency and format before the graduate studies review. See our Tennessee Tech dissertation and thesis editing and Tennessee Tech 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 Tennessee Technological University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your Tennessee Tech writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.