The vans pull off the country road and disgorge about a dozen sleepy students. The ragtag bunch trudge off into the deep woods armed only with a set of checkpoints and a semester's worth of team-building training.

What's this, some new sort of "Survivor"-esque reality program? No, the scene described above is the HOBO Hike, the culminating rite of passage for future executives and one of the cornerstone courses in Juniata's business curriculum.

"The hard part of the business world is the gray zone- the area of ambiguity where a problem or assignment is not clear," says Jennifer Dean '92, former vice president of marketing for Nationwide Insurance Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, and now a strategic marketing consultant for the firm. "Dealing with ambiguity and bringing the right people on your team are skills you need in business."

The vagabondish acronym HOBO refers to the course's original title "Human Behavior in Organizations." Created in 1975 by the late Ron Cherry, a venerated Juniata business professor, the first incarnation of the course was modeled on the Harvard Business School case study curriculum. Cherry tossed in the hike, an overnight wilderness campout and an obstacle course, giving birth to a Juniata tradition.

These days, the course is called "Behavioral Analysis of Organizations" (students and faculty alike still refer to it as HOBO), and management specialist Randy Rosenberger has inherited Cherry's legacy. Together with Bill Duey, a retired former Juniata College faculty member who co-teaches the course, Rosenberger has emphasized decision-making and leadership while interweaving the case-study method and the hike experience into the course.

"HOBO taught you to think and bring together divergent opinions into a single solution-it was not a paint-by-the-numbers approach," recalls Dewayne Rideout '80, senior vice president of human resources at Manufacturers Services Limited in Boston, Mass. and an early HOBO graduate. "That course represented a virtual reality of the business environment before you actually entered the business world."

The climactic hike is not graded, other than a simple rule that all teams must finish together as a team, but the paper students write on the experience is graded. "They must connect some aspect of the course with their experience on the hike," says Duey, whose experience with HOBO spans both the Cherry and Rosenberger eras. "Invariably, a leader emerges on the hike because it turns out they have a skill others on the team do not have."

HOBO's team approach is the foundation many of the other business courses are built on. In Management Information Systems, accounting professor Pat Weaver directs 10 student teams in real-world projects for outside clients. Accounting professor Dominick Peruso led teams of advanced accounting students through projects such as business valuations, financial projections and system cost evaluations at the St. Francis University Small Business Development Center. Finance professor Mike Frandsen directed a team of 12 students to perform a business evaluation for Thompson's Candles, a local entreprenuerial business.

Teams also are the focus of the College's newest wrinkle in business education, the Hands-on Enterprise Leadership Lab, known colloquially as HELL Lab. Taught by business professor Jim Donaldson, the lab is structured to be taken over four semesters, giving business students the opportunity to follow a business creation sequence. Only the introductory lab is a required course, but students with a talent for business creation can go through the entire sequence from idea to implemetation.

The first season in HELL (fall 2002) found 34 students in the first lab sequence. The class formed eight project teams. Donaldson reports that four viable business ideas emerged from the lab, including a greeting card business and a video/DVD rental business. "Unfortunately, none of the students decided to take a business idea forward," Donaldson reports. In the spring, nine students took the first lab sequence and created a business called Grandma's Attic. The business plan centers on selling donated collectibles and other items on e-Bay to fund the College endowment. Those who donate would receive a tax credit.

"We will make a presentation for funding to the venture capital board this semester," says Christi Spackman '06, a sophomore from Warren, Pa. and one of four business students who decided to take Grandma's Attic forward into the second sequence of the entrepreneurial program. "This entire process made us think outside the box and pay attention to all the details."

This year, the introductory lab will be divided into three sections of about a dozen students, from which four business ideas should emerge. Students enrolled in HELL Lab 2 are scheduled to meet at the same time, allowing students such as Spackman to act as coaches or mentors for the beginning class. "The second-semester students also can make a pitch to the beginning students to recruit them for their own enterprises," Donaldson says.

In addition, students from the upper-level Entreprenueurship course also are scheduled to meet at the same time as the students in the HELL sequence. "The Entrepreneurship students will become built-in lab assistants, while still pursuing their own ideas," Donaldson says. "The business floor in Good Hall will look like a Paris traffic jam, but the cross-pollination of these classes will be great."