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Josefine Liau ’25 brought an unexpected kind of experience to her Goldman Sachs interview: the post-graduate kind. Among students competing for an entry-level role, she had so much more to discuss than coursework and a summer internship.
Through the 15-month School Safety Xperience (SSX), Josefine worked with teammates from other disciplines to develop an affordable system to detect weapons in schools and quickly alert responders. Her team, Weapon Watch, reached the finals, and she left with business plans she’d developed and AI systems she’d tested, proof of what she could bring to the role.
And Goldman Sachs knew exactly how to put that experience to work.
“During the job interview for my current role, I referenced my work creating business plans and testing the AI for my Xperience work. My work testing systems is probably the main reason I was hired, as it’s a large part of my work today.”
Josefine Liau, Weapon Watch, UMD Finance ’25
Good company, in every sense
Josefine’s story is one of many from our first SSX cohort, where 100% of job-seeking graduates secured a role or became a founder. Students landed at Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, SpaceX, Boeing, IBM, Stripe, and FedEx, or launched ventures of their own.
The names are impressive, but hearing how students got there is even more telling. Felix Ogordi, now at Capital One, also drew on SSX in interviews, discussing his team’s school safety device, stakeholder research, and business model, including the thinking behind decisions he helped make.
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The sequel looks promising
Our Mental Health Xperience (MHX) teams are gaining that same experience while tackling a problem they know firsthand: mental health on college campuses. The competition attracted 281 students across 62 teams, with 42 students on eight teams reaching prototype development and user validation by September. Oura’s donation of 50 Oura Ring 4 devices is helping participating teams bring real biometric data into their testing and improve their products.
Some of MHX’s most exciting work is still ahead. The coming months could bring unexpected discoveries and solutions that go further than we first imagined. If SSX has taught us anything, it’s that what these students build is only the beginning. The bigger story will be what they go on to do because of it.
But don’t take it from us. MHX student Samuel Bond is already showing where this experience can lead. After building Radiant through the competition, he felt prepared to become co-owner and founding engineer of DIRA. When we ran into him at TEDCO’s Entrepreneur Expo, he was preparing to pitch in front of more than 1,000 attendees. He went home with a $25,000 Concept Capital award. “I was drawn to xFoundry’s reputation for supporting builders who can think beyond traditional boundaries,” he told us. We’d say he’s making good on that.
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