hi i would like to seek advice if i'm really in dilemma. i am 3 months into my PhD project. When i first came in, i had quite a shock as my professor told me to read up in the literature to find a research question. i asked my fellow phd candidates from other labs and they felt pity for me. The only thing my professor told me was to find a research question for a cell line (new system).

it took me a month to come up with a research question. So i ordered the cells. The thing is this cell line is extremely 'sensitive'. I made a mistake initially where i let the cells come into contact with each other and this might be the reason why it could not differentiate at a certain temperature within 14 days. I have wasted two 14 days waiting for the cells to differentiate already.

What i kinda dislike about my lab is that you are expected to be independent right from day 1. I wasnt even assigned a senior member in the lab who could teach me things. And i feel its a bit too much to expect a new phd student(fresh from undergrad studies) to handle a project from scratch.

i probably have to tell my professor about my mistake which could have resulted in the cells not differentiating. im currently quite stressed and worries that i am getting nowhere 3 months into my project. All my friends from other labs have made quite some progress in their own projects and im stuck at this step.

any advise?

Firstly, you are only 3 months in so it is way too early to be worrying about progress. If you have no results after a couple of years then that is a different matter.
Secondly, mistakes are to be expected at all levels of ability so dont stress when they happen.
Thirdly, a PhD is supposed to be about completely independent research. Working independently will make your thesis easier to write because all the work will be yours.
Fourthly and most importantly, you should NEVER compare your progress to others who started with you. That is the road to hell and madness my friend. It may look like you are behind your friends but you are already ahead of them. You are already coming up with your own ideas and working alone. Your friends sound like they havent begun the journey yet.

Can any bio science researchers here share how many months/years it took them before they got a 'breakthrough' that would more or less set the direction for the entire course of their PhD?

Unless you used the methods and techniques during undergrad then you aren't expected to be an expert at this stage. Ask your lab mates for advice, chat about what your doing and what's going wrong.

Also set up a meeting w/ your supervisor and explain your project and decision making at this stage, is your plan workable and do you have good methods to build the foundation of your research on? Good luck!

I don't think your supervisor is being unrealistic. Frankly, I am working with BSc students right now who are developing their own project proposals from scratch with some discussion and guidance from me. I would fully expect a PhD student to be able to do the same, even one at the start of the process. You don't have to get things right straight away, but you should be able to synthesise material you have read to generate your own ideas. You have a starting point, so do some reading and figure out a line of enquiry. Then worry about designing and developing experiments.

My guess is that your supervisor wants you to develop your own ideas and is trying to encourage you to be an independent researcher from day 1. This is a VERY good thing.

What's a breakthrough? Ah, you mean that elusive thing all scientists spend their waking days trying to find? That Eureka moment? It doesn't exist. It's a myth. A PhD thesis is often just a collection of random experiments that might eventually link together to suggest that a hypothesis is correct or incorrect. It's highly unlikely this hypothesis is going to be very novel or interesting. Maybe after many years of collaborative research you'll realise you've found something that changes the understanding of something big, but by then it will have been so many years coming it won't feel like much of a breakthrough...

Don't stress yourself out at this stage - all the small experiments you are doing will lead to something, even if it's just what not to do. A PhD is training experience after all - that's why you're called a student.

P.S. If you must know, my thesis had three data chapters (all subsequently papers): chapter 1 - I got the main result in my first year, but then spent the next three years doing more experiments to collect more data, chapter 2 - I got the main result right at the end of my third year, chapter 3 - I got the only result in my so-called writing up year.

In fairness it is possible to get very lucky and find a result which leads to a series of other results. That happened to me but I don't think it is common.

The original poster gives the impression that a PhD student will be expected to roll back the frontiers of science and technology but it simply doesn't work like that as you say. Almost all PhD students simply make a series of tiny discoveries, nothing earth shattering etc.

Let's say you get three responses to this.
How does that help your situation?
You are either going to feel hugely relieved or you are going to use it as a weapon to beat yourself up with. Either way you are going to put yourself through violent mood swings for absolutely no reason because none of their successes or failures can possibly impact on your PhD.
For example, I have 5 papers published at a steady rate of 1 or 2 per year with the first after 4 months with 2 further papers waiting to be written. The guy sitting right next to me published only 2 papers but before he had started writing his thesis got a job as a Reseach Scientist at the Beatson Cancer Research institute in Glasgow whilst I have no job on the horizon yet with no guarantees of remaining in science at all. So the point I am making is that none of this matters. His lack of papers didn't make my PhD any easier and my large numbers of papers didn't affect his either. Of course he could have beaten himself up by comparing his record with mine but that would have been stupid given where he ended up relative to me.

Your lack of success isn't your problem.
Your attitude to your PhD very much is.
If you don't fix that problem you risk hating the entire process or being broken mentally before you are done.
If you don't believe me, have a trawl through the forum and look at the state people get themselves into.

What i was referring to is..
A breakthrough that can be in the form of a publishable data. Not the nobel laurete kind of discovery.

Hey Iwan

I see where you're coming from. You really are in the early stages though, so try not to worry. You will thank your sup later for making you (or letting you) be independent from day one. That independence doesn't mean that you can't run your plans and thoughts by your supervisor - that is what they are there for (in my view at least) - to provide some guidance once you've shown initiative and made some tracks yourself (which by the sounds of it you are doing - including the mistake you made - that is part of the progress and learning, even though it feels horrible at the time).

I'm not a bio scientist so can't share closely related experience, but it took me a good while to "get into" my PhD. Some of my peers had got much further with their projects than I had by the time I finally felt like I was on track. I felt pretty peed off, demotivated, and lost for a while - but it did eventually get better (maybe half a year in). I'm very glad I persevered through all those feelings. As pm33 says, try not to compare yourself to others. Everything you're doing during this time of uncertainty will be useful later (even if it is "just" that you learnt some basic stuff and got familiar with the lab). Your breakthrough will come.

All the best :)