Teesha Patel finished her BA in Accounting and Finance at Greenwich in 2025 and now works as a Finance Executive at a large company in India. The year of her degree that got her there, in her view, was the third one: a sandwich-year placement inside the university's own Alumni and Fundraising Team.
Why she picked the course
She'd been drawn to Accounting and Finance for the numbers side of business. The course also wasn't the kind that would pin her down too early, which mattered. She liked having options.
Studying at Greenwich
The campus helped too. It sits right on the Thames, has seventeenth-century architecture all around it, and there's a DLR line that puts central London fifteen minutes away. Teesha liked being able to flip between historic Greenwich and the full version of the city whenever she felt like it.
Why she chose a placement year
The sandwich year wasn't compulsory. She chose it. Before any application went out, she went through Employability Services to get her CV and cover letter tightened up. After that came a practical test, an interview, and an offer for the role of Prospect Research Assistant.
The work was research-led. Most of her day-to-day was getting properly under the bonnet of how fundraising runs inside a university. Who gets approached, why, what gets said. Around the edges of the job itself, she picked up the kinds of things you don't tend to get from a seminar room: working across different teams, holding her own deadlines, knowing when to ask for help and when to crack on.
That year ended up being the most useful part of the whole degree, especially as an international student. London is a hard city to break into professionally if you don't know people already, and she came out of the placement with that network in place. Spending day after day inside a UK workplace was probably the bigger thing, getting a feel for how that kind of environment runs and where she wanted to fit into it.
Where her degree has taken her
She's a Finance Executive at a large company in India now. Ask her what made the degree work, and the answer comes back to that one year on placement.
Most undergraduate courses at Greenwich Business School come with the option of a sandwich year. Find out what a placement could look like for you, and where it could take you next.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please note that course timetables, the availability of modules and opportunities offered to, and services for, students can change over time - i.e. things may not be available from one year to the next - and that some things may also not be available to you if you are joining Greenwich as a direct entry student. In the case of modules, please always check the 'What will you study' section of the course webpage for the course and entry year you are interested in. You can find an index of all our subject areas, within which you will find the individual course pages, at: https://www.gre.ac.uk/subjects
