This semester, I'm taking some courses at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. I ended up going to my first Olin classes a few days ago. It was quite a trip, mainly because it forced me to better understand and enjoy Brandeis.Here I was, strolling the Olin campus for the first time, and it felt great. My first class was exciting, held in a nice airy room with sunlight and an easygoing professor. Later, in a different course, we would design Lego devices and explain the engineering process in witty flowcharts. As a Computer Science major, I felt good-I had rejoined my people.

Olin's main auditorium was mostly full later that night as students came to see the big convocation speaker, who had written a required-reading book about integrating empathy with design.

One brave soul put this empathy guru on the spot: "In your book, you mentioned manipulating the fears and insecurities of students in marketing Target's laundry bags. Isn't that unethical?"

Then, to my amazement, student after student tripped over themselves to rationalize why Target wasn't preying on people's emotions or at least to argue that the company's doing so was a good thing.

One boy clumsily tried satire: "Well, Coca-Cola gives people diabetes. That means they're an evil company."

I just wanted to scream. "Don't you understand? Do you know what Coke does? They build compounds in India with huge drills to bore into the earth and drain the aquifers for miles around. Wells stop working. All these rural people from miles around are so thirsty that they have to buy Dasani bottled water, which, by the way, is owned by Coke."

Laundry bags are a small issue. The line between manipulating insecurities and legitimizing them is thin or insubstantial. Still, the tone of the place, the choice of speakers, the insipid corporatism of the students-it was all just maddening.

Five minutes before this discussion, a girl had asked, "What if you just have to lay off workers? How can you tell them that firing them is for the good of the company?" This wasn't a challenge: She was sincerely looking for advice on middle management.

By now I was furious. In America, "the good of the company" seems to mean paying executives millions of dollars to charter private jets to Sardinia in order to have Roman-themed orgies. There's no good way to tell someone that losing their livelihood means less to you than the well-being of an abstract organization. Why was she wondering about all this, anyway? Was this really the sort of person I wanted to interact with on a regular basis?

This year so far, Brandeis' big speaker has been Kevin Bales. He frees actual modern-day slaves. In his speech he talked about domestic workers locked up in the cellars of Connecticut mansions and a whole village in India that for generations had belonged to one landowning family. He cried in front of us as he talked about being forced to return some Thai sex workers to "hell" because their pimps were holding his friend hostage.

That's the sort of speaker Brandeis students pack the room for. The sort of speaker Olin invites wants to teach you how to more effectively push plastic crap from China. Perhaps I had been taking Brandeis for granted.

I got into my car and sped away into the night, back to Brandeis with a newfound appreciation. The people here are fantastic. The professors here will spend an hour chatting with you about your future. There are interesting nooks and crannies, barely known departments and administrative units doing great things.

Don't get me wrong: I think Olin is great. I still plan on taking classes there, possibly living there, definitely enjoying it there. The people there are incredibly smart, and they try hard to give back to their community. But I now really appreciate Brandeis University. You know, for a long time I've been focused on what Brandeis could be, or should be, or promised to be. I've worried about improving Brandeis, changing Brandeis, holding it accountable to its ideals and fulfilling the Brandeis vision. It's time to enjoy and appreciate what Brandeis is.

In the past few weeks, I've explored the Castle, gone to a ridiculously fancy dinner party, had maybe dozens of interesting chats with my professors, plotted activist strategies with friends, danced at the Chabad House and broken bread with graduate students and first-years alike, not to mention what I have done in my classes. Brandeis is a good place. The people here are so nice that they'll devote their lives to helping people they've never met thousands of miles away, and that's great. Still, that shouldn't preclude focusing on the present. It's time to take a step back, reject urges to be grimly preprofessional, and simply soak in the wonderful essence of life.