Freddy Morley, (Jul. 1, 2026)The MPhil at Cambridge is an excellent opportunity to do focused, self-led philosophical research. The course packs a lot into one year.
The MPhil course is structured so that you cover three topics - one each term. This gives you a good amount of time to dive in and understand the content at a level of detail you don’t get at an undergraduate level. I found that the quality of supervision and feedback was excellent throughout. I especially enjoyed the MPhil seminar sessions, where you hear your peers present their work (and present your own). The opportunity to see how others do philosophy is something that I felt was missing from my undergraduate course, and I learned a lot from throughout the seminar sessions.
Outside of the course, there are several excellent workshops, seminars, and discussion groups hosted by the philosophy department at Cambridge (the Moral Sciences Club, Serious Metaphysics Group, Episteme, Contemporary Political Thought Seminar). I highly recommend attending these on top of your MPhil essay work. Overall, the MPhil is highly rewarding, and a great way to develop your skills as a philosopher.
Nina Fuglsang, (Jul. 1, 2026)The MPhil is an excellent way to become a more confident researcher, because you are responsible for most aspects of your own work. It can be challenging to navigate in the beginning if you aren’t experienced with organising your time, finding readings, gauging the relevance of your research, etc. But you will improve these skills over the course of the degree, and that’s quite rewarding.
Your supervisors and advisor will provide a lot of support, both with your work and with developing academic skills. But the broader postgraduate community at the faculty was, to me, an unexpected source of valuable advice and sparring (in addition to hosting lots of great social and academic events). If you do the MPhil in Philosophy, I can only encourage you to take advantage of being around so many wonderful philosophers in whatever ways you can.
Paula Keller, MPhil Student 2018-19, (May. 6, 2019)Overall being on the MPhil has been a challenging but very rewarding experience.
It gave me the opportunity to work in three different areas of philosophy which I made use of working in philosophy of language, history of political philosophy and feminist philosophy. While I very much enjoyed doing so much independent work, organising my day was at times difficult, especially at the beginning. But I believe that having learned how to do and structure independent research during this MPhil will help me while working on a PhD.
A further advantage of graduate study in Philosophy at Cambridge is the Graduate Centre with desks and computers where I work almost every day and leave my books. This allows me to hardly ever work at home, to be around other philosophers while working and I usually leave the Graduate Centre in the early evening. I, therefore, managed to make time for relaxation and non-academic activities much better than I did during my undergraduate degree also at Cambridge.
During the MPhil I also found time to participate in faculty life: organising reading groups, attending seminars and lectures as well as presenting my own work and doing some teaching has both deepened my philosophical knowledge in areas I am interested in and helped me gain confidence as a philosopher.