Some researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of students' initial experiences on campus and suggested that these experiences might play a critical role in their future success. These initial learning experiences, focuses on learning aspects related to students' awareness and feelings. The learning experience is established in the relation between students' approaches to studying, learning motivation, their perceptions of the learning context, their conceptions of phenomena, and their feelings associated to the understanding of the phenomenon itself. In fact, when we claim students to face study and achieve academic demands, there are multiple components that control all academic activities and straight interfere with the students' condition. We believe that components are ordinary cognitive, metacognitive and affective strategies which put together, influence the decision maker about 'what to do' (attitude) to achieve learning goals and 'how to do' (regulate) to perform this achievement. In our study, students' approaches are described in terms of their deep and surface orientations to study (attitudes). Students' self- regulated strategies are described in terms of the metacognitive behaviours (planning, monitoring and regulation). This study sights to examine if college students' perceptions, specifically psychosocial and academic variables, during the first-year of high education, could be linked to academic self- regulation and success. How and what university students study and learn is usually investigated in a descriptive way or, quantitatively, by separately measuring the main variables considered to be influencing the study methods quality and learning success. Based on phenomenographic studies, a diagnostic instrument named ETApES was developed and validated, covering three main perceived academic students' experiences (involvement, enrichment and self-regulation). This instrument in its first version incorporated 124 items (based on the research literature) divided into 10 subscales (curricular adjustment, assessment adjustment, course adaptation, quality of teaching, interaction with peers, academic satisfaction, perceived difficulties, perceived academic gains, meaning and reproducing approaches to studying and academic self-regulated strategies used) with alphas superiors to 0.75 that explain 60 % of the total variance. This poster presentation summarises some findings from a preliminary study carried among a sample of 230 students of two Higher Education Institutions. Some significative differences between ETApES dimensions and demographic parameters allowed us to validate the discriminatory potential of the instrument, beyond his descriptive diagnostic function. Data correlational and exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Regression analysis was performed to study the direction on the studying processes regulation of these higher education students. The methodologies adopted in this preliminary study are also described.