12-08-2025
Summer camp at Triton College goes deep into letting kids build stuff
In 2019, Izzy Cicirello was 13 and, like a lot of other middle schoolers, packed off to a summer day camp.
Cicirello went to Triton College in River Grove, where she spent a week welding, exploring trade tools and manufacturing along with her peers. She liked it well enough but it was just a summer camp, another week in another summer break in a long line of summer breaks, the same as every school year. It wasn't like she was particularly interested in welding, she recalls.
'It was mainly because my parents signed me up for one of the workshops at GLOW (Girls Learning to Weld),' she explained.
But welding lit up something in her. Four years and a trip across a high school graduation stage later, she went back for more.
'I realized I don't know what I wanted to do for college,' she said. 'I noticed that Triton has a welding certificate and then I remembered I went to welding camp.'
And now, in 2025, Cicirello is back at Triton College, this time as a summer camp counselor. Last week she led 14 middle school students through a submarine summer camp. The camp, Building Giants Manufacturing Camp, was a hands-on chance for kids to learn some mechanical skills. Ostensibly, it was a week of learning STEM skills and putting classroom lessons to the test with motors, gears, electronics and a pool filled with water.
But at this summer camp, instructor Atingone Sharris said, the kids are really learning about themselves. These students are discovering who they are, what they like and what they might do with their lives. As with Cicirello, Triton may not have seen the last of some of the students when the camp ends.
Sharris recalled that when she went to Lane Tech, it was still very much a technical high school, meaning the kids got to manufacture things. They learned how to build, and she loved it.
'I took shop classes when I was a kid and I was my father's shadow before that when I was in grade school and we repaired everything,' Sharris said.
In the decades since, she's watched high schools shift focus away from hands-on technical skills such as repairing motors and welding and move into more academic-oriented fields like computer engineering and, more broadly, college-readiness.
Sharris said that model leaves behind a lot of kids who would be interested in building things and making something but never do because they don't know those jobs even exist — nobody offered the introduction.
Sharris said community college summer camps can serve as that introduction and, for people like Cicirello, they have been that introduction.
'These are the vehicles to help improve people's lives,' Sharris said. 'They don't get access to these experiences in school.'
It shouldn't be this way, Sharris believes. School should be the place where students get help figuring out what kind of work they want to do — schools should provide the launch pad for careers. And if not high school, then community college — but why even wait until graduation?
'You shouldn't be waiting until you graduate to finally touch a tool, it's terrible,' she said. 'If you want to be a writer, you can be a writer in high school.'
Summer camps like hers allow students to do more than make submarines and work with motors and wiring and soldering. They can ignite a lifelong passion.
'If you get to here,' she said, pointing to her heart, 'the rest will take care of itself.'
