State scholarship holders are poor and rural adolescents with outstanding academic performance in high school. They live in high socio-economic and educational risk, and therefore they are supported to pursue a university education. Scholarship holders (n=285) answered the Resilience Scale for Adolescents (READ); the SISCO to evaluate their stressful situations, symptoms and coping strategies; the UWES-S to evaluate engagement; and the SPANNE to asses negative and positive emotions. Results from the simple mediation analysis indicated that academic coping is indirectly related to subjective positive wellbeing through its relationship with engagement: path c: β = .157, p < .05; path a: β = .373, p < .001; which, in turn was subsequently significantly positively associated with wellbeing (path b: β = .462, p < .001. A 95% bias-corrected CI (5,000 bootstrap samples) indicated that the indirect effect (path ab: β = .172) was entirely above zero. However, the parallel mediation model (moderated-mediation) shows that the indirect effect of academic coping mediated by vigor on wellbeing is an increasing function of RSA personal competence (a1b3 = .036; 95% CI -0.432, 0.198). In conclusion, personal competence discriminates different patterns of positive adaptation in complex models of mediation in Peruvian adolescents.