Description: Traditionally, higher education has been a privileged space of both production/diffusion of scientific knowledge, and training of professionals (or experts), as well. Recently, higher education has become itself an object of knowledge, mobilizing its professionals in a continual process of reflexivity. This social reflexivity (Giddens, 1994) is due, not only to institutional devices - such as the assessment of higher education institutions - but also to pedagogical relevance, emerging from research university teachers produce themselves about their teaching practices or about their pupils. Such expertise processes reflect the need public institutions have, in democratic societies, to inform citizens about what they do, in the name of efficiency in administration of public resources. At the same time, those processes firmly contribute to offer cognitive frames of social comprehension, that is, to add increased self-knowledge to modern societies. That is precisely the context of the research underlying this presentation. Aiming to obtain substantial scientific knowledge on the constitutive features of its own identity, as a contribution to think critically about its own institutional processes, the University of Lisbon launched a research programme on its students'academic paths. The study presented here is part of this broader research programme. This paper deals with social categories and schooling paths. It aims to analyse the social and academic background presented by those entering first year undergraduate courses offered by the University of Lisbon and the kind of academic choices they have made in the near past. In fact, in modernity, higher education represents a crucial space where future projects are built and where the search for individual autonomy is consolidated. Being adult students, the active production of an individualized identity - expressed in subject choices or courses - may lead to non-linear, extended schooling paths that may include several attempts to enter the preferred course or even course transfers. From an institutional point of view, these non-linear student trajectories may be understood as underachievement. In fact, school achievement is usually linked to straight, linear academic careers. But from a student's point of view, the experiment of different academic paths may oppositely represent successive attempts to an enlightened discovery of the "self" (Singly, 2000). These findings on the University of Lisbon will be contextualized both at a national level and at a European level. Methodology: The research method used in this study is survey. On one hand, we will work with data obtained through a standardized questionnaire applied by the University of Lisbon each year to first year students of all undergraduate courses. This extensive data base refers to the academic year of 2003/2004. On the other hand, we will use other data sets such as national official statistics and the results of the European study Eurostudent 2005. Conclusions: Based on first year students of all undergraduate courses offered by the University of Lisbon, we intend to: - bring forward a sociographic picture of these university newcomers - capture both linear and non-linear schooling trajectories - analyse sociologically such students's profiles