This research had the objective to examine the occurrence of stress among 27 master students of health sciences of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe [Federal University of Sergipe], of which 16 were women and 11 were men. And, it also sought to delineate the coping strategies used to deal with the stress and the stressors perceived by the graduate students. Lipp's Stress Symptoms for Adults Inventory, the Ways to Confront Problems Scale and a questionary about possible stressors were used. The results indicated that 40,7% of subjects had stress and that there was an association between stress and sex (p<0,05), showing that women were more vulnerable to stress. The association between sex and the main coping strategies used by the participants that didn't have stress (p<0,05) was verified, showing that focalizing on the problem was a more frequent strategy among men. We believe that more investigation on this topic is important, because the performance of master level students may be influenced by the stress during graduate education.
Stress; graduate education; master's degree; coping
