Should I enroll in an Mphil program? Wil
Question
Should I enroll in an Mphil program? Will getting an Mphil help me get into grad school abroad?
Answer
The cards can't tell you whether an Mphil gets you into grad school abroad — that's written in admissions requirements, not in a deck. What they do show is that this decision is being fought out in your own head right now, and that the next honest move is documentary, not a commitment.
| Position | Card | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Past | Five of Wands · upright | You've been running this from several sides at once — cost vs. credential, staying vs. going, what a supervisor thinks of it. Real friction, but it's an argument, not a verdict. |
| Present | Two of Swords · reversed | The stalemate is cracking. Reversed here isn't bad news, it's the blindfold coming off: you can no longer sit evenly on both options, which is why the question has gotten louder. Sitting with it longer is over. |
| Future | Page of Swords · reversed | The trajectory is the student mind turned slightly wrong — quick conclusions, arguments won alone before anyone else is in the room, plans built from impressions rather than from what a program actually says. A tendency under that condition, not a forecast. |
Two of the three are Swords and all three are minor, so this sits in the thinking channel as a practical, decidable question — not a structural life chapter. Nothing in this draw says the Mphil is right or wrong.
The conditional: if you get one program's written requirement and it names a research master's, or credits it explicitly in the selection criteria, then the Future page's warning is not about enrolling — it's about enrolling and then improvising your applications out of impressions instead of out of what they told you. If the requirement says nothing about it, then the Page reversed is precisely what you've been doing already: letting a title stand in for evidence the program never asked for.
Your move, inside 48 hours: email the admissions office of the single program you'd most want to attend and ask them, in one line, whether a research master's counts in their selection criteria — then keep the written reply, and read nothing else about it until it arrives.
Want this spread drawn as a picture, or the reading saved to your journal?