Introduction: Medical students during their course of education may experience stress when their curricular demands tends to exceed their resources to deal with them, and they have been also reported to suffer from higher perceived stress compared to the general population and students in other academic fields. Current study aims to assess the level of stress in first year medical students.

Objective: To assess the perceived stress levels in first year  medical students.

Method: Across-sectional study was conducted among first year medical students of Al-Azhar medical college and super speciality hospital. Where, perceived stress scale -10 (PSS-10) was used for assessing the perceived stress levels. The data was entered in Microsoft excel and analyzed using SPSS version 16.

Results: Of the 150 first year medical students,who took part, 109 were females and 41 were males. Most students reported PSS- 10 mean score of 24.56 (SD 7.24) and scores ranging from 8-38. There was no difference between the mean stress levels of male students and female students p>0.05.

Conclusion: The study reported that there is a higher level of stress among the medical student than compared to the general population. Also there is no difference in stress level between male or female students.

Keywords: First Year Medical Students; Perceived Stress; South India.