General Studies courses are core to the whole education philosophy espoused in the United Arab Emirates. These courses provide a wider breadth of knowledge for students by fostering skills such as critical thinking, global awareness, research and communication. This paves the way for building the UAE’s knowledge base and delivering graduates who can compete globally through research and innovation. The research explores the role of experiential learning within General Studies to cultivate these key skills, and seeks to capture students’ responses to this type of learning. This is a mixed methods study that includes ethnographic data collection, uncovering the complexities of a lived classroom learning experience from the perspective of the students. Data was collected from interviews with students, written reflections and a Likert scale survey. Results suggest that Emirati female students respond favourably to experiential learning, thus countering previous findings about their preferred learning style. This study contributes significantly to a field with scant knowledge of experiential learning as a vehicle for instruction in a tertiary Emirati context.