Pressing the glass into the ribbon burner, I feel the heat crawling up my forearms, a familiar, stinging reminder that physics doesn’t care about your intentions. It is 5:06 a.m., and my phone just vibrated against the workbench with a wrong-number call from someone looking for a woman named Bernice. The caller sounded frantic, asking if the shipment of gaskets had arrived, and when I told him he had a neon technician in a dusty shop instead of a warehouse manager, he didn’t even apologize. He just hung up. That’s the world right now: high-velocity demands, zero direction, and a lot of people shouting into the wrong receivers. I’m standing here with a piece of 16-millimeter lead glass that is currently the temperature of a small sun, thinking about how this reflects the exact panic I see in the eyes of the teenagers who occasionally wander into my shop looking for ‘experience’ to put on a piece of paper.

By 11:46 p.m. last night, I’m betting at least 46 parents in this zip code alone were sitting in the blue-light glow of their laptops, nursing a headache and 16 open tabs. They are scrolling through lists of ‘Pre-Collegiate Leadership Summits’ and ‘Global Impact Innovation Intensives,’ trying to figure out which $2896 sticker will look best on a common app. It’s a frantic, quiet sort of arms race. The teenager is usually in the other room, muttering about how every single website promises to change the world but none of them explain what the kids actually do for 36 hours a week besides sit in air-conditioned rooms and listen to other people talk about changing the world. We have reached a point where the packaging of the self has become more important than the substance of the person. We are building neon signs with no gas inside. Just cold glass tubes, beautifully bent, completely dark.

The Neon Technician’s View

I’ve been a neon technician-Alex M.-L., the guy who fixes the flickering ‘Liquor’ signs and the ‘Open’ signs that have hummed since the Nixon era-for 26 years. You learn early on that you can’t fake a vacuum. If there is even a microscopic leak in the seal, the mercury-argon mix won’t ionize. It won’t glow. It will just sit there, a dead piece of sculpture. Education has become a series of leaks. We are teaching 16-year-olds how to ‘curate’ a brand before they have even learned how to be useful to another human being. They are stacking activities like they are playing a game of Tetris where the blocks are made of air. I had a kid come in here 6 weeks ago, a bright-eyed junior from the high school up the street, asking if I offered a ‘structured internship in artisanal industrial design.’ I told him I had a broom and some broken glass that needed sorting. He looked at me like I had asked him to harvest organs. He didn’t want the work; he wanted the title of ‘Intern’ at a niche design studio. He wanted the 6-word bullet point.

This is the deeper trauma of the modern college application process. It’s not just that it’s competitive; it’s that it’s performative in a way that feels suspiciously fake. Every summer program sounds like a revolution. ‘The Young Entrepreneurs Global Forum.’ ‘The Future Scientists Research Collective.’ These titles are designed to sound impressive to a weary admissions officer who has 46 seconds to scan a profile. But when you peel back the layers, what is actually happening? Often, it’s just a glorified vacation where the students pay a premium to hear a few lectures and engage in a ‘simulated’ project. Simulation is the death of skill. You don’t learn to bend glass by simulating it. You learn by burning your fingers 56 times until you understand the exact moment the glass becomes plastic. You learn by failing to make a ‘B’ in a ‘Bakery’ sign so many times that you start seeing the curves in your sleep.

Beyond the Resume

I think back to that wrong-number call at 5:06 a.m. That guy wanted gaskets. He wanted a specific, physical thing that makes a machine work. He didn’t want a ‘Gasket Integration Strategy.’ He wanted the part. Colleges, despite what their marketing says, are actually looking for the part. They are looking for the kid who stayed with a single, boring, difficult task for 106 weeks because they actually cared about the outcome, not the optics. The contrarian truth is that the most selective schools are starting to sniff out the difference between ‘credential collection’ and ‘sustained evidence of utility.’ They are tired of the kids who have 16 different 1-week certificates. They want the kid who can actually hold a bead on a weld, or write a piece of code that doesn’t crash 76 times, or manage a group of stubborn volunteers without having a ‘Leadership Consultant’ title.

I’m not saying that every summer program is a scam. That would be too easy, and life is rarely that simple. I’ve seen 6 or 7 programs that actually push kids into the deep end of the pool. But those programs don’t usually lead with ‘Global Impact.’ They lead with ‘This will be hard, and you will probably be bad at it for a long time.’ They value depth. They value the kind of contribution that doesn’t fit neatly into a 160-character box on a digital form. For instance, engaging with High school summer internship programs for college prep can be a pivot point because it focuses on the actual mechanics of innovation and entrepreneurship-the stuff that happens when the slides are turned off and the real problem-solving begins. It’s about moving past the superficial ‘hey look at me’ phase and into the ‘here is what I built’ phase.

The Scars of Expertise

We are currently raising a generation that is terrified of scars. If you fail at a summer program, it might ruin the narrative. So the programs are designed to ensure no one fails. Everyone gets the certificate. Everyone is a leader. But a world where everyone is a leader is a world where no one knows how to follow instructions, and believe me, if you don’t follow the instructions on a 15,000-volt transformer, you aren’t going to be leading much of anything from a hospital bed. I spent 46 minutes this morning trying to explain to a customer why I couldn’t just ‘glue’ his broken neon back together. He wanted a quick fix. He wanted it to look right, even if it didn’t work. I told him I don’t do fake. I don’t do ‘visual-only’ neon. It either carries the current or it’s trash.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to look like something you aren’t. I see it in the parents who come into my shop to get custom signs for their kids’ graduation parties. They want signs that say ‘The Future’ or ‘Success.’ They spend $676 on a sign that will hang in a basement for 6 months and then get sold at a garage sale. They are chasing the aesthetic of achievement. But achievement isn’t aesthetic. It’s dirty. It’s 5:06 a.m. phone calls. It’s the smell of burnt ozone. It’s the 136th time you try to solve a math problem and finally realize you were using the wrong formula for the first 135.

Real Usefulness

I realize I’m sounding like a crank. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m still thinking about Bernice and her gaskets. But there is something fundamentally broken about the way we are asking teenagers to audition for their own lives. We are asking them to be the CMO of themselves before they’ve even been a junior clerk in their own souls. We are teaching them to optimize for an audience that doesn’t even exist. Who is this ‘admissions officer’ we are all so afraid of? They are just people, often 26-year-olds with their own student loans and their own 16 open tabs, trying to find someone who feels real in a sea of manufactured excellence.

If I could take every 16-year-old and drop them into a situation where they had to be genuinely useful for 36 days-not ‘influential,’ just useful-the world would change overnight. If they had to fix a fence, or organize a library, or help a neon tech move a 96-pound manifold without breaking the vacuum, they would learn more about ‘leadership’ than in any institute with a gift shop. They would learn that the world is heavy and that things break if you don’t handle them with precision. They would learn that being useful is the only real way to feel like you belong.

Carrying the Light

I’m going to finish this ‘Open’ sign today. It’s for a small diner 46 miles away. The owner is a guy who has worked the grill for 36 years. He doesn’t have a resume. He has a diner. When he flips the switch and the red neon hums to life, it isn’t ‘curated.’ It’s a signal. It tells people there is food, and heat, and a place to sit. It’s a real thing in a world of simulations. We need to stop asking our kids to build signs for businesses they haven’t even started yet. We need to let them get into the shop, burn their fingers, and learn how to carry the light. Because if the tube is empty, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the curve is. It’s just a piece of glass, and glass is fragile.

Why are we so afraid of letting them be invisible until they are actually ready to shine?