Academic support for higher education students in multilingual contexts often focuses on the development of separate language proficiencies, on the one hand, and on general study skills, on the other hand. In bi/multilingual education contexts where students are presented with lectures and study material in more than one language, successful students develop specific practices that allow them to exploit their bi/multilingual proficiency, that is, without focusing on one language only. This article reports on a qualitative study conducted with postgraduate students at Stellenbosch University. It probes the strategies and processes that successful bilingual students use when different languages are available to mediate cognitively challenging material. Bilingual strategies and practices that are employed emerged from a series of semi-structured interviews with postgraduate students, and are presented as an insight into bilingual learning. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)