Triton College summer camp focuses on letting kids build stuff

In 2019, Izzy Cicirello was 13 years old and, like many other college students, packed themselves in a summer day camp.

Cicirello went to Triton College in River Grove, where she spent a week to weld, exploring commercial tools and manufacturing with her peers. She loved it quite well, 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 was not as if she was particularly interested in welding, she recalls.

“It is mainly because my parents signed me for one of the workshops of Glow (girls learning to weld),” she explained.

But welding illuminated something in it. Four years and a trip to a secondary school graduation step later, she returned for more.

“I realized that I don’t know what I wanted to do for the university,” she said. “I noticed that Triton has a welding certificate, then I remembered that I went to the welding camp.”

And now, in 2025, Cicirello is back at Triton College, this time as a summer camp advisor. Last week, she directed 14 college students in an underwater summer camp. The camp, Building Giant Manufacturing Camp, was a practical chance for children to learn mechanical skills. In appearance, it was a week of learning STEM skills and setting up class courses to the test with engines, gears, electronics and a swimming pool filled with water.

But in this summer camp, the instructor Atingone Sharris said that children really learn from themselves. These students discover who they are, what they like and what they could do with their lives. As if to Cicirello, Triton may not have seen the last of some students at the end of the camp.

Sharris recalled that when she went to Lane Tech, it was always a technical high school, which means that children were able to make things. They learned to build and she loved it.

“I took store lessons when I was a child and I was my father’s shadow before that when I was in primary school and we have repaired everything,” said Sharris.

During the decades that followed, she saw the secondary schools move the development of practical technical skills such as the repair of engines and welding and move to areas more oriented towards academics such as computer engineering and, more broadly, university reading.

Sharris said that the model leaves a lot of children behind him who would be interested in building things and doing something but never doing because they don’t even know that these jobs exist – no one has offered the introduction.

Sharris said the summer colleges summer camps can serve as an introduction and, for people like Cicirello, they were this introduction.

“These are the vehicles to help improve people’s lives,” said Sharris. “They do not have access to these experiences in school.”

It shouldn’t be like, Sharris believes. The school should be the place where students get help to find the type of work they want to do – schools should provide the launch ramp for careers. And if not the school, then the community college – but why even wait for graduation?

“You should not wait until you get your diploma to finally reach 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 his allow students to do more than submarines and work with motors and wiring and welding. They can ignite a permanent passion.

“If you get here,” she said, pointing her heart, “the rest will take care of himself.”

Jesse Wright is an independent journalist for Pioneer Press.