The research Project, Foreign students, a university challenge, was aimed to describe the coping strategies and the social skills used by foreign students of the Universidad Catolica de Oriente (UCO) in their adaptation process. A descriptive research was carried out, with a non experimental cross sectional design, the study was carried out with a convenience sample using the snowball technique. The sample consisted of 48 students of different careers, enrolled in the semester 2-2018 and 1-2019 of the UCO, these students came from different areas to the “Zona del Altiplano” (Highland area) of east of Antioquia; these students were distributed in 26 people of the female gender and 22 people of the male gender with an average age of 22 years and ages between 17 to 41 years from 47 different municipalities. The instruments for the collection of information were a sociodemographic survey, and two questionnaires, the Multidimensional Scale of Social-Cognitive Expression (EMES) (Caballo & Ortega, 1989 cited in Carballo et al, 2012) and the scale of Coping strategies - modified (ECC-M) (Londono et al, 2006). It was found that the coping styles most used by the population were to restrain coping, positive re-evaluation and open emotional expression. In addition, in social skills the sample presented a medium level demonstrating the presence of anxious and negative thoughts in a moderate way in social situations.