Empowering women at engineering symposium

There’s no challenge too small for community member Gracie Diabo, who has kicked off this semester of her studies at McGill University with organizing SymPOWEsium, an annual conference for women in engineering.

Diabo is co-president of Promoting Opportunities for Women in Engineering (POWE), a club at McGill University that focuses on engaging as many women as possible in the field. SymPOWEsium is the organization’s largest annual conference, bringing together current students, alumni, and professionals to inspire the next generation of engineers.

This year’s conference worked around the theme “We’ve got the POWEr,” and the conference opened with a keynote speech from Stéphanie Breton, a McGill mechanical engineering alum who is the technical lead at Dunsky Energy and Climate Advisors and a past POWE president.

“It was really inspiring to see her journey past just the four years in university, it was a real highlight of the conference for me,” Diabo said.

The event was also an opportunity to network with fellow engineers, including students from other universities who came to Montreal for the event.

“We got to have a nice dinner with some girls from the University of Sherbrooke and Queen’s University, and that was really nice to talk about our clubs and how we’re similar,” she said.

Diabo and the rest of the POWE team organized a jam-packed schedule for attendees, including a workshop focusing on better understanding the path to becoming a professional engineer in Quebec, a networking skills session, and a community-building event encouraging the development of practical leadership skills.

Panels included a collaboration with Sustainability in Engineering at McGill (SEAM), which focused on women in sustainability careers, a graduate studies panel, and an interactive student internship panel, where attendees shared practical tips on securing internships in the field.

Diabo said that being a part of POWE and taking part in the 2026 conference has been one of her biggest highlights at McGill so far.

“It’s really rewarding, I think it’s taught me so much about event planning but also people relations, and communicating, and teamwork,” she said. “I’m learning about taking risks and having to zoom out and look at everything ahead.”

Serving as the organization’s president has grown her soft skills, she said.

“It’s super challenging but also super rewarding to be the president of an organization that has such an impactful mission, and I think it definitely felt worth it at the end of the conference to see the girls making connections or talking with the professionals,” she said. “Things like that really show the impact of what we’re doing.”

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