Emotional competence includes emotional and social skills that affect the way a person experiences, expresses and regulates his/her own emotions. People with higher emotional intelligence can easily identify their emotional state and better understand how their emotions relate to their behavior and affect their daily lives. In addition, people with higher emotional intelligence are more likely to recognize and distinguish the emotions of others. People who better understand, express and control their emotions also better adapt to new and unpredictable situations, which is extremely important in the current circumstances of the pandemic, but also the earthquakes that happened in Croatia. Emotional competence is important for various aspects of an individual's life, such as academic or professional, and interpersonal relationships in general. The aim of this research was to explore the association between emotional competence and some aspects of academic success, such as involvement in study assignments, goal orientations, academic self-concept and study success. The research involved 248 students from different universities in Croatia, aged 19 to 42 years, and data were collected by an online questionnaire. The results indicated that students with a higher level of emotional competence have higher average scores on measures of affective and cognitive-behavioral involvement in study assignments and higher average assessments of academic self-perception and better academic achievement. On the other hand, no differences were obtained in the expression of task orientations with the level of emotional competence. The paper also examined whether there are certain differences between students with higher and lower levels of emotional competence in experiencing some specifics related to the previous academic year, during which classes due to the Covid-19 pandemic were mostly held online and during which 86% of students in the sample experienced earthquakes. The obtained results indicated that students with a higher level of emotional competence perceive that in the conditions of online studying, they are more successful in fulfilling obligations related to the faculty, but also that they experienced earthquakes as a more stressful event compared to students with a lower level of emotional competence.