Introduction:

Reading is a path to humanization and the development of societies and individuals. Diagnose the bond to the reading among the university students is the first step to develop strategies that allow its promotion.

Objective:

Establish reading habits in a student population.

Method:

A sample of first-year nursing students of the UVM Villahermosa, period 02-2018, was chosen through simple random sampling, a survey on reading habits was applied, a database was generated in the SPSS software and analyzed to obtain results.

Results:

48% of the population was analyzed, all of the nursing career and in its first university semester, 80.55% female, average age of 18.37 years. 46% lived in two-parent households. 84% depended on an economic scholarship to be able to study. Only 9.37% referred taste for reading, 18.75% had read 2 or more books in the last month. 84.37% only read books of his career by obligation and spent an average of 1 hour. 3.12% had parents who read daily and 34.37% of these were professionals. 21.87% could imagine what they read, 81.24% referred medium to severe difficulty to read, 68.75% had difficulty concentrating and 34.37% understood what they read.

Conclusions:

The sample was primarily feminine, came from non-two-parent households, with economic problems, with non-professional parents and no taste for reading. The sample did not show adequate reading habits, which affected their reading comprehension, they read by obligation and not by pleasure. The critical thinking of the students could be affected and this would result in their performance in the teaching-learning process as university students.