Writing skill is one of the important skills on academic performance. However, sometimes the students find some difficulties in writing academic essays. The researcher has also experienced the difficulties in writing academic essay. Therefore, this research aims at investigating the difficulties faced by EED of UMY students in writing academic essays and indentifies how the EED of UMY students overcome the difficulties in writing academic essays. The researcher used descriptive qualitative design to achieve the purpose of the research. The participants of this research were four students in seventh semester of EED of UMY. The reason was because students in seventh semester of EED of UMY they had already have experienced in writing academic essays at least ten academic essays in last one year, and the researcher chose in-depth interview to elicit information from the participants. The data from the interviews were analyzed by coding which were validated through member checking. The result of this research was found that there were eight major difficulties that were faced by EED of UMY and also there were seven major strategies that were used by EED of UMY students to overcome the difficulties. The result of this research showed that cognitive strategies used by the students to overcome the difficulties are related to lack of linguistic knowledge. Taking note strategy was used by the students to overcome the difficulties regarding to lack of linguistic knowledge, and lack of organization of ideas. Proper quotation and paraphrase were used by the students to solve the problem regarding to inadequate of knowledge for doing proper paraphrasing. Memorizing strategy was used by the students to overcome problem related to lack of linguistic knowledge. Social strategy were used by the viii students to solve the problem regarding to lack of linguistic knowledge, literal translation, inadequate of knowledge for doing proper paraphrasing, and lack of references. Revising and editing strategy was used by the students to overcome problem related to technical writing error. Internal strategy was used by the students to solve the problem regarding to problem arising from learners.