"This study investigates Emirati student motivation on their choice of majors. With a current lack of Emirati engineers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this study is timely in nature. It grew out of the researcher's personal experiences from participating in Khalifa University of Science and Technology's (KU) entrance interviews, which revealed that a significant number of students chose engineering for reasons not typically found in the West. To further investigate this phenomenon, a campus survey was conducted along with group interviews. This paper will explore the development of education in the UAE, the reasons why students choose certain majors in the West, as well as examine student motivation for choice of engineering majors both in the West and in the UAE. A detailed discussion of the findings and their implications will then follow. The paper concludes with a major recommendation - based on the findings of the study - on how to recruit a greater number of students to study engineering in order to fill the current gap in the industry" --page 1.