Imagine taking a massive 12-credit course during your junior year that integrated all the key components of your major.

This was one consideration in the Smeal College of Business Administration's two-year effort to overhaul and repackage undergraduate business education for University students -- a move made in response to an evolving business environment.

One result of the college's study is the creation of four three-credit, interrelated core courses all students will take during their junior years, starting with the entering freshman class from Fall Semester 1994. About 949 freshmen entered the college last summer and fall.

The classes -- which will cover disciplines including finance, logistics, operations, marketing and management -- will be taught by teams of professors who will work closely with each other to relate the concepts taught in all four classes.

"We're trying to create a program that reflects how businesses think today," said Kenneth Lusht, professor of business administration and chairman of the department of insurance and real estate.

"I think we're reacting to what's happened in business," he said. "It wasn't that long ago that businesses were divided by topic area. It's only recently that businesses began to think more in terms of function and process than in terms of area."

The college's current undergraduate curriculum is not on the cutting edge, said Ronald Koot, associate dean of undergraduate programs in the Smeal College.

"You get a little injection of knowledge in isolation, but that's not how the real world works," Koot said. "It's all one big gigantic jumble. Everything affects everything else."

Mike Hillyer (sophomore-finance) will not be affected by the overhauled curriculum, but said the current structure makes it more difficult for students to understand clearly the integration of different business areas.

"It's a little bit tougher now because you see it in different classes, and you get a lot of overlap of the same material in some classes," he said.

The trend in recent years has been for business professors to become more and more specialized in their own fields without taking notice of what was happening in other related business areas, said Peter Bennett, associate dean of the Smeal College.

"We have put more and more responsibility on the student to make sense about this," he said. Bennett expects that the new curriculum's innovation may result in a better applicant pool of University business students.

"We feel this whole project could identify Penn State as the leader in the undergraduate business world," he said. "We expect that people in business are going to look at this graduate and say, 'I want him. He understands the integration.' "

Such an outcome could lead to higher job placement numbers for the University -- a crucial factor in attracting entering freshmen, Bennett said. If the program proves to be successful, many expect other schools to follow Penn State's lead.

In addition to the integrated curriculum, the college plans to introduce a multimedia element that will incorporate high-tech computer programs into classroom and individual laboratory work.

"Classroom technology has gone from blackboards to overheads. Now we're moving to computers and telephones," Lusht said.

Professors at Penn State are developing a prototype for a comprehensive business computer program to be created during the next 1 years and marketed to other universities.

Another change in the undergraduate business curriculum is a new foreign language requirement. Starting with the entering freshman class last fall, all business students will need to demonstrate three semesters of proficiency in a foreign language.

But the requirement will not be fully enforced for a couple years because of the immediate strain the influx of business majors will cause for the College of the Liberal Arts. Exemptions will be granted for students unable to schedule foreign language courses because of a limited number of sections.