Applying for a PhD-Where to Start?

skinsseries3

Hi all- I would be gratful if anyone could shed some light on the best way to proceed to apply for a PhD. I have just finished a Masters in Law and am extremely passionalte about the area. I have already been in contact with careers in my Uni and although they were helpful in giving me the basic information on how to go about applying I'm still uncertain about how to start making progress!
I know that you have to draft a research proposal which is considered to be somewhat original in the relevant field and to contact suitable potential supervisors in variouis institutions in the hope that one of them will be interested in supervising your work. I havent come up with a proposal as of yet and a lecturer from last year tells me that it may be better to contact potential supervisors and tell them I am interested in doing a PhD reather than send them a detailed proposal in the event that they might have better ideas for proposals which they are interested in thus incresing the chance that they'll supervise your work. Would it be better to wirite up a research proposal or just contact lecturers generally?

Another issue is funding. Would anyone be able to give me general information on how to go about applying for funding or what the routes for doing so are? My preference would be to stay in Ireland to do this however I am open to travelling to the UK if it is necessary.
Thanks in advance:)

Max001

Just been through this process. I'd advise;

1. Think about an area of law that you're particularly interested in. (or a few areas) For instance, what you might wish to specialise in, career-wise. A professor friend told me a PhD is 99% perspiration & 1% insipiration and while that may be hyperbole, I'd guess its not too far off.....therefore at the outset you want to focus on a general area that really interests you. Unis understand that over the course of your first year, you'll likely change/refine/add to your research question. Therefore your research proposal doesn't have to be very precise. Your potential supervisor should give you a few pointers, but as you've no doubt seen, there's a huge amount of info on the www about writing a research proposal.

2. Find some potential supervisors with similar research interests.

3. Go talk to a few. If they're open to supervising you, they ought to give you contact details of recent PhDs they've supervised so you can do some informal due diligence. Getting a good supervisor is half the battle, as you know.

4. Only once you've settled on a uni and a supervisor and that person's agreed to supervise you (in principle), ought you to produce a research proposal. My own supervisor teased out a few research questions with me, as well as gave me some ideas on where to gather data and this was a year ago......several months before I intended to formally apply.

Thats how I went about things. Not necessarily the right way, but its the way I did it

Funding I'd not touch, cause our circumstances are probably different.

Best of luck!