Florida State University students spent 24 hours building AI-powered tools to help solve one of higher education’s toughest challenges: connecting students to the right internships and early career opportunities.
Hosted by FSU’s Innovation Hub, the university’s 10th 24-Hour Design Sprint, “Hack the Job Market,” brought together interdisciplinary student teams and industry mentors from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to design, prototype and pitch new technologies aimed at simplifying and personalizing the job-search process.
The event marked a new partnership between FSU and AWS that gives students access to advanced generative AI tools, hands-on technical support and continued mentorship to move winning ideas beyond a 24-hour prototype and toward production-ready solutions.
“Events like this Design Sprint hosted by the Innovation Hub provide our students with unique and incredibly valuable opportunities to work closely with industry, university, and community partners, and apply what they are learning in the classroom to design innovative solutions to real-world, challenging problems.”
— Paul Marty, associate vice provost for academic innovation
“Higher education is at a critical turning point where we must move beyond traditional instruction to meet the needs of today’s lifelong learners,” said Paul Marty, associate vice provost for academic innovation. “Events like this Design Sprint hosted by the Innovation Hub provide our students with unique and incredibly valuable opportunities to work closely with industry, university, and community partners, and apply what they are learning in the classroom to design innovative solutions to real-world, challenging problems.”
During the event, 10 interdisciplinary teams competed in an initiative led by the FSU Career Center, using AWS methods and AI technologies to develop systems that better match students with ideal internships, a process that is currently complex and time-consuming.
To guide their innovation process, students used Amazon’s proprietary “Working Backwards” framework, which requires teams to define the ideal customer experience and draft a hypothetical press release and FAQ (PRFAQ) before beginning technical development. This process is designed so the final product remains rooted in human empathy and user needs.
“The Innovation Hub teaches ‘Design Thinking’ as an innovation framework that has been embraced by corporations around the world,” said Ken Baldauf, founding director of the Innovation Hub. “AWS’s Working Backwards methodology is their own version of Design Thinking, what they call their “Secret Sauce” for developing human-centered innovative solutions.”
Teams then translated those visions into reality using AWS Kiro, an agentic coding platform powered by Amazon Bedrock. The tool allowed students to enter their proposed ideas, and FAQ along with other natural language prompts to autonomously generate working code, documentation and tests, enabling rapid prototyping of sophisticated AI-driven solutions.
The event led to a high-stakes pitch competition where teams presented their prototypes and fully functional apps to a panel of experts. The winning solutions offered fresh perspectives on navigating the modern hiring landscape, from AI-driven networking assistants to personalized career path mapping tools.
Taking first place was Spear Career AI, a multidisciplinary team of FSU students: Naman Bajpai, Shib Sudha Behera, Jazib Damani, Ryan Nageer and George Quintans. The group developed an internship dashboard that gamifies professional development by using AI-driven tools, such as automated cover letter generation and real-time job board scraping to help students track marketable skills and bridge the gap to production-ready career opportunities.
“Everything moved fast, ideas were constantly changing and there was a lot of problem-solving on the fly, but that’s what made this experience so rewarding,” said Jazib Damani, a freshman at the Herbert Wertheim College of Business. “Watching something come together in such a short time was a massive achievement.”
Second place was awarded to Nole Path, a team comprised of Colin Garbutt, Bomine Jayasinghe, Daniel Miranda, Carlos Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Katya Serechenko and Ermithe Tilusca. Their project featured an AI Career Strategist that personalizes the professional development journey by scraping live job advertisements to provide students with real-time, data-driven insights into career readiness.
Third place went to appliRL, developed by the team of Avery Dasher, Samir Kanbar, Ryan Kurfirst, Darya Pylypenko and Gabrielle Vays. The group designed an AI agent that bridges the gap between campus and career by transforming traditional networking events into interactive “scouting combines” where students can showcase their technical skills directly to recruiters.
“In just 24 hours, we learned how to think from the user backward and build forward with clarity,” said Naman Bajpai, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We learned when building a product, working backward is the fastest way to move forward.
As part of the partnership, the winning team will receive continued support and mentorship from AWS to further develop their solution, bridging the gap between a 24-hour concept and a production-ready application.
About 500 students have participated in the 24-Hour Design Sprints, more than 4,000 have completed Design Thinking and Systems Thinking courses, another 1,000 have taken the Emerging Tech class, and hundreds are active in the Seminole Innovator RSO.
“These students have learned the value humans bring in an increasingly automated world,” Baldauf said. “How to empathize with others, and how to frame problems, ideate, and prototype your way to solutions leveraging the latest technologies.”
The 24-Hour Design Sprint was supported by the FSU Career Center and sponsored by various colleges and departments.
“When students from different disciplines come together to tackle complex challenges, they don’t just solve problems — they discover new possibilities for themselves,” said Rob Liddell, assistant vice president for Career Services. “Interdisciplinary teams spark curiosity, build confidence and become powerful launchpads for career development and discovery.”
For more information about the Innovation Hub and upcoming events, visit innovation.fsu.edu.