In this paper, we report on an on-going study of novice university students in mathematics and the secondary-tertiary transition. A total of 146 novice mathematics students from three Swedish universities were given a questionnaire in the beginning of the semester. The aim was to characterize them as learners of mathematics. The results were summarized with descriptive statistics and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to look for correlations. The results show that the teacher and the textbook play a crucial role in their learning of mathematics. Further more, the students can be characterized as either individual or interactive learners, which relates to students’ grades.