Students strategies to survive the academic transition: recycling skills, reshaping minds

Abstract

ABSTRACT The expectations students bring to Higher Education (HE) are explored, as well as the way they handle the clash betweenwhat they expect and what they actually find when attending Engineering programs. This study intends to understand if dissimilarengineering student profiles can be identified when considering the centrality of the student’s role in his or her life, and the academicsuccess. The focus was put on the experiences of first-year students on an Engineering HE institution to uncover four differentways/rationales to build their own identity as a HE student. If an overinvestment in the student role can predict a greater possibility forfurther studies and an underinvestment can predict lower resilience that can lead to failure or dropout, the ability to manage theirstudent role together with the other roles associated with youth seems to predict an academic success similar to those who devotedtheir lives exclusively to studying. In other words, the fact that the student role overshadows the youth role is not enough for success.The balance between different life roles appears much more as a predictor of academic comfort and, consequently, of success.