A Mississauga student won a top Ontario engineering scholarship.

Originally from Mississauga, Marwa Zaryab, a second-year University of Waterloo engineering student, won Hydro One’s Women in Engineering Scholarship, earning $5,000 and a paid co‑op placement in Ontario’s energy sector.

Zaryab, 19, attended Rick Hansen Secondary School in Mississauga and found a passion for engineering and robotics through her older brothers.

“I am the first woman to study engineering in my family,” she said.

She chose to study systems design engineering because it combines different types of engineering to manage complex systems. While her program has a high number of female students, other engineering programs remain male-dominated, she said.

People who study systems design engineering can go on to project management. Zaryab hopes to work in software or robotics engineering.

“I just want to work for a company that does good for other people,” she said.

While a high school student in 2024, she restarted a school program that brought programming workshops for children living in a refugee hotel.

Zaryab said the program was an outreach initiative from her high school robotics team, but it hadn’t run in over four years.

“When I found out about it, I really wanted to bring it back,” she said. “I really care about accessibility in education.”

About 50 to 60 kids showed up. They were aged 3 to 14 and spoke little to no English, she said. They used visuals to help the kids understand, and it worked.

“You could see the impact it had on them by how they smiled,” she said. “You knew how much they had been through because they fled their country because of war or conflict.”

The experience was very rewarding.

“Being able to show them a little bit about engineering and education…it was a really good experience,” she said.

Zaryab said winning the scholarship was validating and she is happy to promote women in engineering.

“Having a platform to talk about these things is really great,” she said.

Her paid co-op position in software engineering is this summer in Toronto.


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