AI Interview Prep Platform Guides Students From Classroom to Career

With the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence embedded in the job interview process, it’s no surprise that 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-led solution 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 alumni. Team members include Krishang Parakh, MSIS ’24; Aromal Nair, MSIS ’24; Aditya Kamath, MSIS ’24; Anna Huertazuela, MBA ’25; Deep Dalsaniya, MSIS ’24; and Venkatesh Shirbhate, MSIS ’24.

Following a fortuitous meeting with Coomber at a December 2024 case competition during which she established the need for a product like STRATPATH, the team immediately sought to bring Coomber’s vision to fruition in creating a dual-purpose solution for college professors and career coaches, alleviating case study grading for instructors and offering a different experiential learning approach to the job interview process. 

“I would actually describe it as an experiential learning platform that uses AI-powered case simulations to help students either crack the interviews or the case studies,” says Nair. “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. 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 gain access to 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 its 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 another dimension to experiential learning in their courses. In Coomber’s case, she’s extracted value from STRATPATH’s comprehensive feedback, which is delivered to users “almost instantaneously.” 

“I was able to cut down my grading time from 8 to 10 minutes per paper to about 2 minutes. We trained the platform to grade it more comprehensively than I could even do, and students have really actionable feedback that would allow them to improve their skills,” says Coomber.

The platform is already being incorporated into classroom learning at the Smith School. Four classes, totaling over 200 students, have interacted with it so far. The team aims for nearly 1,000 active users by the end of December.

What started as an aspiration to impact one professor’s course has now become a vision to become the leading experiential learning marketplace for students, faculty and hiring managers.

“All of us on the team graduated from the master’s program and have learned so much side by side as we’ve begun implementing STRATPATH across multiple courses,” says Parakh. “There have been sleepless nights, and as we're all actively looking for jobs, we’ve had to manage everything together. It’s been an exciting journey.”

Nair and Parakh extend their thanks, in addition to Coomber, to the various Smith faculty who have been instrumental in offering insights and providing avenues for testing their product. Some of those professors include Tejwansh Singh Anand, Mary Beth Furst, Balaji Padmanabhan and Brent Goldfarb.

They also express deep appreciation for the Smith’s centers, including the Office of Career Services team, for assisting in populating the platform’s database of interview questions, as well as further support from the Center for Social Value Creation and the Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship.

It’s the culmination of this input, the generosity of others and the UMD entrepreneurial ecosystem that have contributed to STRATPATH’s early success, Nair and Parakh say. Looking ahead, they hope this support ultimately helps the Smith School further enhance its reputation for preparing business graduates for the future of work.

“UMD is really open to building ventures, and professors have always given us their time and provided guidance,” says Nair. “Everyone has always shown us support and positivity, and we’ve appreciated the constructive criticism and the platform we’ve been given to create STRATPATH here. All of that support has helped us keep moving forward.”