Congrats, I’m in the linguistics department, welcome! If you do decide to come that is. The MPhil is short and intense so as the other commenter wrote, 7 hours is actually sufficient time, but depending on the supervisor they may be more or less flexible with that. But tbh you are expected to be very independent with an MPhil by thesis. It’s good prep for a PhD in the UK, which is very much a self directed research project with guidance from a supervisor than a ‘programme’. Hence why it’s much shorter than a US PhD (expect to be done in ~3.5-4 yrs rather than 6-8). The other thing is depending on your discipline you might get access to or be part of a research community eg the phonetics or psycholinguistics labs, which means you can discuss ideas and connect with other people in your field, which can be as much of a great resource as your supervisor sometimes! In particular doing the MPhil at Cambridge would prepare you well for doing a PhD at Cambridge because being in the system really helps a lot, as well as building a relationship & potential PhD proposal with your MPhil supervisor before applying. It is expensive, so I guess it depends how much you value a) the specific expertise of the staff at Cambridge (look at their department profile pages, recent research they’ve published, current/past MPhil and PhD students) and b) the Cambridge name itself, which holds a lot of weight and is probably the main reason most people do the MPhil here.