AI Interview Prep Platform Guides Students From Classroom to Career

As companies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to help them sort through reams of resumes, job seekers are also looking for ways to boost their chances of success with the technology. Now, a team from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business has a platform to help.

Known as STRATPATH AI, the student-developed system offers opportunities to practice for case study-based interviews of the sort management consulting and other firms use to judge applicants’ skills, as well as to prepare for nontechnical behavioral interviews. The system, which interacts with students through voice chat or a written format, also provides instant grading of the simulated interviews along with real-time, personalized AI feedback. 

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: 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.

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,” Nair said. “Why not combine both of them and build a platform where students can actually practice these case studies in an interview format?”

Users gain access to a library of real-world cases across various industries and can practice working with different analytical frameworks they might be asked to employ at a real interview: mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive analyses, Porter's Five Forces, profitability analyses and others. Users can also prepare for behavioral interviews by practicing with the STAR (Situation, Task, Action and Result) format, a way to answer complex questions accurately and concisely that is used by companies worldwide.

“Let’s say you get an interview at Bain & Company or at McKinsey,” Parakh said. “They want to look at how applicants use these real-world tools. So we created an entire database of these frameworks that are used not just in the Smith School, but everywhere.”

The platform’s AI capabilities mimic current interview experiences at such companies, with vetted follow-up questions that realistically amp up the pressure just like in a real job interview, based on accounts from recent interviewees at the companies and feedback from Smith School career coaches.

Students who use 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, meanwhile, 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 found value in STRATPATH’s comprehensive feedback when assessing written analyses that are part of the case studies. 

“I was able to cut down my grading time from eight to 10 minutes per paper to about two minutes,” she said. “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.”

So far, the team has tested it across with hundreds of students across five departments at the Smith School, and anecdotally have heard it is an effective interview coach. “I’ve used it myself and found it is good practice for job interviews,” said Parakh.

The team is aiming for 1,000 users by December and considering the possibility to create a visual interface to deepen the platform’s realism.

Other Smith faculty who were instrumental in their support included Tejwansh Singh Anand, Mary Beth Furst, Balaji Padmanabhan, Brent Goldfarb and Nima Farschi. Smith’s centers, including the Office of Career Services team, 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.

“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,” Nair said. “All of that support has helped us keep moving forward.”