UMD Smith Student-Led Team Produces AI Platform to Transform Job Interview Prep

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Nov. 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- 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 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 eight to 10 minutes per paper to about two 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 has been incorporated into classroom learning at Smith. Four classes totaling over 200 students have interacted with it, as the team aims for 1,000 users by the end of December 2025.

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."

Other Smith faculty instrumental in developing the platform include Tejwansh Singh Anand, Mary Beth Furst, Balaji Padmanabhan, Brent Goldfarb and Nima Farschi. Also, Smith's Office of Career Services assisted in populating the platform's database of interview questions, and the Center for Social Value Creation and the Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship offered further support.

"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."

About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
Located eight miles from Washington, D.C., 35 miles from Baltimore, and situated inside the Capital Beltway, the Robert H. Smith School of Business is a recognized leader in management education and research. Smith's over 70,000 alumni are part of the 400,000-strong University of Maryland alumni community. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland in College Park, the Smith School is plugged into the business, government, nonprofit and professional networks of the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., metroplex. We offer undergraduate, online and on-campus business master's, full-time, part-time, online and executive MBA, PhD and DBA degree programs, graduate certificates, and non-degree and executive education programs.

Contact: Greg Muraski, [email protected]

SOURCE University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business