University of Maryland Students Build AI Interview Prep Platform for Job Transition

With artificial intelligence increasingly embedded in the job interview process, job seekers are also turning to AI to prepare themselves accordingly. And a team from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business has a platform to help.

STRATPATH AI is a student-developed system that integrates case-based learning, behavioral interview preparation and instant grading along with real-time personalized feedback to help students prepare for their transition from the classroom to their professional careers.

Supervised by Smith's Nicole Coomber, assistant dean of experiential learning and a clinical professor of management and organization, STRATPATH is led by a team of recent Smith graduate program alums: MSIS students Krishang Parakh, Aromal Nair, Aditya Kamath, Deep Dalsaniya and Venkatesh Shirbhate, and MBA Anna Huertazuela.

The team based its work on Coomber's vision of a dual-purpose experiential learning solution; her idea was that it would help college professors grading students working on such case studies—like analyzing the operations of a local taco restaurant looking to boost its business with AI—as well as assisting career coaches and the job applicants themselves.

"There's a lot of manual grading involved for professors with these case studies, and there are many times when students have to give interviews as well," says Nair. "Why not combine both of them and build a platform where students can actually practice these case studies in an interview format?"

Through STRATPATH, users access a library of real-world cases across various industries and can practice working with different analytical frameworks, including mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive analyses, Porter's Five Forces and profitability analyses. Users can also better prepare for behavioral interviews by practicing with the STAR format—Situation, Task, Action and Result—a popularly used format globally.

The platform's AI capabilities also mimic current interview experiences at companies like Bain and McKinsey, with vetted follow-up questions and simulated pressure informed by actual interviewees and Smith School career coach feedback.

Students who utilize the platform's interviewing capabilities are scored on criteria such as creativity, communication and critical thinking, and can review their past attempts and performance insights to improve for future interviews and better align with employer expectations.

Professors, conversely, can use the platform to tailor assessments, optimize grading and easily add