Writing Your Bachelor's Thesis at a Company: Here's How It Works

Your topic is roughly there, the module registration deadline is five weeks away and you still have no company. Students who set out to write a bachelor's dissertation at a company underestimate exactly one thing: the gap between the first email and a signed agreement is usually measured in months, and none of those months counts towards the time you get to write.

You find a company for your bachelor's dissertation by checking what your programme handbook allows, turning your idea into a one-page proposal that reads as the answer to a business problem, and sending it to several organisations at the same time: through your university's placement and careers team, through the graduate boards that carry dissertation and placement adverts, and speculatively to firms whose work already sits close to your question. We will show you the channels that get replies, what belongs in the application, and the agreement that leaves you enough hours to write.

📌 The short version

• One UK credit equals 10 notional hours of learning.
• A 40-credit dissertation module works out at 400 hours.
• A course placement under a year carries no minimum wage entitlement.
• Your own earnings do not reduce your maintenance loan.
• Ethics approval comes before data collection, with no exceptions.

Where to find a company for your bachelor's dissertation

Five channels lead to a company, and they differ in how much of the work someone else has already done for you. An advertised project is quick to apply for and comes with the topic attached. A speculative approach costs an evening of research and gives you a question you actually chose.

Which channel should you try first?

Work through them in the order below rather than starting with a job board, because the first three put a person between you and the inbox, and in British universities that person is usually easier to reach than students assume. The further down the list you go, the more of the legwork falls to you and the more control you keep over the question.

1. Your placement and careers team. Most UK universities employ staff whose job is placing students with employers, and some departments keep a live list of firms that have hosted projects before. Ask whether any of those firms have taken dissertation students, not just placement students.
2. The employer you already have. If you work part-time, have done a sandwich year or spent a summer somewhere, you already know the systems and the people. Go to the manager of the team you worked in rather than to central HR.
3. Your supervisor's own contacts. Academics in business, engineering and computing schools often run consultancy or knowledge transfer work alongside teaching. Those contacts rarely appear on a web page, so ask in a supervision meeting.
4. Graduate boards and careers fairs. On Prospects, TARGETjobs, Milkround, Indeed and LinkedIn you can pair words like dissertation, final year project or industrial placement with your subject. Prospects sets out what the different forms of work experience and placement actually involve, which is worth reading before you reply to an advert.
5. A speculative approach. The slowest route and the one that produces the best fit. Find a named person, usually a head of operations or a marketing lead rather than a recruiter, and write to them directly.

Do you even need a company for your dissertation?

Before you commit to any of this, check whether your project needs a company at all. If you are still choosing a subject, the topic suggestions for bachelor's and master's dissertations will help you turn an industry into a question, and the guide to empirical work in a final year project shows how much access to internal data your chosen method really demands.

What has to be settled before you register your topic

Your hard deadline is not submission day. In most programmes the clock starts when the dissertation module begins, and anything you have not sorted out by then comes out of your writing time. Four things sit in front of that date, and every one of them can slip without you being able to do anything about it.

1. Read the programme handbook. Does your course allow a project based at an external organisation, and does the module leader or the examination board have to approve it? The handbook says so, and your module leader confirms it in writing.
2. Secure your academic supervisor. Nothing else matters until someone has agreed to supervise the project. Ask at the same meeting how the department feels about confidentiality restrictions, because some supervisors will not take on a restricted project.
3. Apply and wait. The longest stage and the least predictable one. Assume several weeks even when the reply is eventually yes.
4. Get ethics approval and written permission. Leeds University Business School requires ethics approval for every undergraduate dissertation, submitted at least two weeks before any data is collected, and a dissertation with no approval at all has its mark capped at 40 per cent. Alongside that you need the organisation's own written permission to approach its staff, which the UK Research Integrity Office calls gatekeeper permission and describes as separate from the consent of the participants themselves.

How many hours does a 40-credit dissertation module take?

Before you can plan any of it, you need the size of the job in hours rather than in words. UK credit gives you that number directly, and the arithmetic takes a minute. Look at the credit value printed against your dissertation module in the handbook, then read the panel below.

Is there a fixed deadline for sorting all this out?

There is no national deadline for any of this, because each provider sets its own. Put all four steps into your plan as separate blocks anyway, before you fix a submission date in your head. None of them goes faster because you started writing earlier. The full sequence from first contact to viva is set out in the overview of writing a dissertation at a company.

The application: proposal first, cover email second

An application for a dissertation project is not an application for an internship. You are not selling your labour, you are selling a piece of work. The person reading your email is asking one question: what do we get out of this, and how much of our time does it cost us?

Most applications fail on that question. They describe the degree and the interest in the sector and never say which problem is solved at the end. So write the document that answers it first, and let the email point at it.

Start with the one-page proposal

A short proposal does two jobs. It answers the effort question before anyone asks it, and you need most of the same material for your ethics application anyway, so you write it once and use it twice. One page is enough: the question, the method, the data you need from the organisation, and a rough timeline with dates on it.

The hard part is the question, not the layout. A brief such as improve our onboarding is a task, not something a method can answer. Turning it into a question about the relationship between two things is your job and nobody else's, and the guide to the difference between a thesis, a hypothesis and a research question walks through that translation.

The email itself: four short paragraphs

One screen, four paragraphs, in the order the questions arise while somebody reads.

• Who you are and what you want to study. Course, university, the months you will be working on it, and your question in one sentence.
• What the organisation ends up with. A staff survey with the analysis written up, a process review, a competitor overview. Something concrete they can put on a desk.
• Why you can do it. The method you already know and where you learned it: a module, a summer job, a piece of coursework.
• What you need from them. Hours, named data sources, and one person who will answer questions.

What to attach, and how many to send

Attach the proposal and a CV, both as PDFs, both named with your surname and the word dissertation so they survive being forwarded. Send them to several organisations at the same time rather than one after another. A single round of application, silence and rejection costs three to four weeks, and you cannot get those weeks back at the other end.

Contract, pay and the minimum wage exception you need to know

The form of the arrangement decides three things at once: whether the minimum wage applies, whether you pay National Insurance, and how many of your paid hours are actually yours to write in. Settle it at interview stage, not on the day someone slides a contract across the table.

Four arrangements are common, and they differ more than their names suggest.

Correct as of September 2026, rates and rules change.

The exception in the first row is the one that catches British students out, and it is stated plainly by the government. GOV.UK says that students required to do an internship of less than one year as part of a UK further or higher education course are not entitled to the National Minimum Wage. All three conditions have to hold together: the placement is a requirement of the course, it happens before the course ends, and it runs for under a year. A placement you chose yourself, outside the course structure, does not qualify for the exception and should be paid.

What are the minimum wage rates from April 2026?

Where the minimum wage does apply, the rates from 1 April 2026 are set out on GOV.UK: £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds, and £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices in their first year.

The age band matters more than most students expect. At 14 hours a week, a 21-year-old earns £177.94 and a 20-year-old doing identical work earns £151.90, a difference of roughly £96 a month.

How much of your paid time is really yours

This is the line you need in writing. Fourteen hours at a desk does not mean fourteen hours on your dissertation, and if both sit inside one contract with no split, you will end up reading papers at night.

The workable arrangement divides the week: a stated number of hours for the day job, a stated number for your research, and a sentence saying whether reading and analysis count as the second kind. Put it in the offer letter or a short side agreement. A promise made in a corridor is forgotten precisely when something urgent lands in the team.

Earnings, student finance and tax: what actually changes

Here is the good news that surprises students who have read advice written for other countries. In England, money you earn yourself does not reduce your student finance. The maintenance loan is assessed on household income, meaning your parents' or your partner's income, and Student Finance England does not ask you to declare wages from a part-time job. Unearned income is different: rent, dividends and interest on savings do count.

That single rule makes a paid dissertation placement far less complicated in the UK than in countries where a grant is clawed back against earnings. You can take the hours without watching a funding threshold. What you do have to watch is tax, and that is where a popular myth gets in the way.

How much can you earn before tax and National Insurance start?

Students pay income tax and National Insurance on exactly the same terms as everybody else. There is no student exemption. What there is instead is an allowance that most student earnings fall under, plus a weekly threshold that behaves differently from the annual one. Three figures decide the whole question, and all three sit below.

• Income Tax. The standard Personal Allowance is £12,570 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, with 20 per cent charged on the slice from £12,571 to £50,270. Earn less than the allowance across the whole tax year and you owe nothing.
• National Insurance. Class 1 contributions start at £242 a week and run at 8 per cent up to £967 a week. This threshold is weekly, so a single heavy week can trigger a deduction even when your annual total is small.
• Student finance. Your own wages are outside the household income assessment, so the loan is unaffected. Repayment only begins after you graduate and pass the repayment threshold.

Does a 14-hour week cross either threshold?

Put the pay figures from the contract section against those thresholds. Fourteen hours a week at £12.71 is £177.94, comfortably below the £242 National Insurance threshold and about £9,250 over a full year, which is under the Personal Allowance. On those figures you should pay neither tax nor National Insurance.

Should is doing some work in that sentence. If your employer has no P45 for you and puts you on an emergency tax code, tax comes out anyway, and you have to claim it back from HMRC rather than waiting for it to correct itself. Fill in the starter checklist on your first day and check the tax code on your first payslip. If you hold a second job at the same time, the codes across both jobs are worth checking together.

Describing the organisation and citing internal sources

The company description belongs in your dissertation only as far as a reader needs it to follow your study. It is context, not a profile: the sector, the rough size, the part of the business you collected data in, and the situation your question came out of.

Do not copy from the firm's own marketing. Phrases lifted from a brochure read as advertising in an academic text and examiners spot them immediately. Describe what bears on your question, and label where every figure came from.

Whatever you write about the organisation has to carry your study. Everything else is a brochure.

How to reference unpublished company material

Internal slide decks, intranet pages and management reports are not published and nobody outside the business can check them, so they get referenced differently. Robert Gordon University's Cite Them Right templates give the Harvard pattern for an internal company document as author or organisation, year, title in single quotation marks, name of the organisation, then the word Unpublished. Their worked example reads: Ademola, T. (2024) 'Minutes of budget meeting 18 July 2024'. NHS Grampian, Aberdeen. Unpublished.

The same guide covers the case where you have been told to hide the organisation's name. Square brackets do the work, with a stand-in such as [Placement agency] used consistently in the citation, the reference list and the document title. A conversation that was never recorded is handled differently again: a personal communication is normally cited in the text only and left out of the reference list, because there is nothing a reader could retrieve. If you are relying on what somebody told you, write a dated note of who said it, in what role and what was said, and keep it.

Check your own department's guidance before you settle on any of this, because referencing styles for unpublished material vary between UK providers and between schools inside one provider. If part of your data comes from a survey you ran inside the business, the guide to running a survey for a bachelor's or master's dissertation covers how to write that up as method rather than as anecdote.

Embargo or anonymisation: decide before you accept

British universities do not have the blanket confidentiality notice that some European systems attach to a student project. What they have instead is an embargo, and it exists mainly for research degrees, where the finished thesis is deposited in an open repository. The University of Sheffield states that the maximum embargo is usually 12 months, that anything longer needs faculty approval with a written rationale, and that a period beyond five years will not normally be approved unless a signed contract requires it.

Your bachelor's dissertation is very unlikely to be deposited anywhere public. That is worth saying out loud to a nervous contact, because it changes the conversation: there is often nothing to embargo, since the only people who will read the document are your supervisor, a second marker and the examination board. What the organisation is really asking for is usually a non-disclosure agreement, which is a contract between you and the firm rather than a university process.

How do you write up a company you are not allowed to name?

Leaving the organisation unnamed solves most of it, and it costs you nothing. Strike the name from the title page and from every sentence in the body, and put a description in its place that still tells a reader what kind of business this was: a renewable energy installer in the South West with around 65 employees.

Where two locations have to be told apart, label them by what they do, the fitting workshop and the call centre, so your comparison still reads. Turnover you cannot print in full goes in as year-on-year percentage change or as a banded range. Nothing in your findings is lost. Two questions settle whether this route is open to you: does your programme accept an anonymised dissertation, and is the firm happy with how much you intend to say about it?

Raise all of this at the interview, not at submission. Ask which specific figures are genuinely commercially sensitive, because the honest answer is often three or four numbers rather than the whole report. Read the small print of anything you are asked to sign, since an agreement that restricts publication binds you as well as them. What an embargo does and does not achieve is set out in more detail in the section on embargoes and restricted access. None of this is legal advice, and your programme regulations are what decide the matter.

No offer yet? Four routes that still work

Rejections are the normal experience of looking for a host organisation, not a sign that you should defer a year. Give yourself a fixed window, eight weeks is sensible, and switch route when it expires rather than sending a ninth application into the same silence.

All four routes below keep your research question and change only how you get the data.

Go back to somewhere you have already worked

A previous placement, a summer job or a part-time role is an open door even when nothing is advertised. You know the processes and the organisation saves itself an induction. Write to the team you actually worked in, not to the careers inbox.

Build the study on open data

A surprising number of questions can be answered without any internal access at all, using company reports, Office for National Statistics releases or datasets from the UK Data Service. The methodological bar is exactly the same, which is the point the guide to empirical work in a dissertation makes at length.

Collect your own data instead

Run your own survey and you no longer need anybody's internal figures. What you need instead is a clear question and enough respondents. Work out what sample size your chosen analysis demands before you send a single invitation, and the guide to finding survey participants shows where the numbers actually come from.

Save the company for your master's

If the calendar has beaten you, write the bachelor's dissertation at university and start looking for an organisation early in your master's year. The effort pays back better there: the project runs longer, the credit volume is larger and the industrial angle carries more weight. What changes at that level is covered in the guide to a master's dissertation at a company.

Conclusion

A bachelor's dissertation at a company is decided in the weeks before you register the topic, not while you write it. Sort out what your handbook allows, get ethics approval moving early, and apply to several organisations at once instead of queueing them up. Get the split between paid work and research hours in writing. And if your own deadline passes with no offer, change the route rather than the timetable.

Where to go next

• Want the whole company process in one place? Writing a dissertation at a company
• Still choosing a subject? Finding a dissertation topic
• Need the structure of the document itself? Bachelor dissertation guide and structure
• Surveying staff inside the business? Running an employee survey

Need a survey for your dissertation that HR will wave through first time?

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