This article reports a project designed to foster first-year music students' academic study skills and to investigate their expectations and experiences of starting at university. Data gathered through questionnaires, diaries and in-class tasks reveal the change in learning strategies and musical identity the students experience in their first semester of the music degree course. Academic work and anxieties about workload and assessment challenge the focus on performing which has previously been the students' main source of musical involvement, necessitating a redefinition of what it means to be musically successful. These findings are discussed in the broader context of musicians' life-span development, and the article concludes with some implications for practice in higher education and beyond.