Learning to learn has been identified as a key educational competence. Over the next two years, as part of the INSTALL project, NUI Maynooth is testing the effectiveness of an exploratory group technique, the Narrative Mediation Path (NMP), which has been developed to promote reflective thinking skills. To date, interviews have been conducted with 200 first year students. Common themes emerging from these interviews regarding student engagement are discussed. Notable was the number of concerns relating to coping with academic demands. From these 200 students, 20 students will participate in the subsequent phases of the INSTALL project utilising the NMP. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure and 2 footnotes.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA) (Madrid, Spain, October 19-21, 2012)," see ED542606.]