Abstract: Higher education is facing a mental health crisis; it is well-known that a significant population of doctoral students drop out of their graduate programs and face or develop mental health distress or conditions. While rates of dropout for engineering students may not differ strongly from other disciplines, engineering students have been suggested to be less likely to seek help from university services for well-being concerns. In this presentation, I describe a multi-phase study: First, a set of longitudinal interviews with doctoral engineering students in which participants identified their top stressors and described the experience of those stressors. Next, I describe the development of the Stressors for Doctoral Students Questionnaire in Engineering (SDSQ-E), a novel survey which measures the frequency and severity of these top sources of stress for doctoral engineering students. The SDSQ-E was administered to engineering PhD students as a subset of a large sample of graduate students at two institutions. The SDSQ-E has the potential to predict factors such as anxiety, depression, or intention to persist in doctoral programs and the instrument suggests a different set of top stressors for students sampled at different institutions.