Im 6 months in now dont know if its going well or not as only PhD student in the lab.
What had you all done by now? I have started a lit review and some practical work and have plenty planned enough to keep me going for 3 years!
Should i be worried i have not started writing/getting useful results buy now?

Don't worry its normal. I had done hardly anything after 6 months. The first year is generally about learing techniques, understanding the literature and planning your work.

I have been repeating the same experiment for 6 months trying to get it to work and the results are just getting worse each time! Everyone keeps tellingme it's my first year and I shouldn't worry, but it's really frustrating and to tell the truth I hate it. Hope I haven't depressed you!

not depressed about it just interested! I worked before this and had quite tight targets but now the freedom is nice! just need to know that im going at the same pace as everyone else.

Not sure what field you're in, but I find chromatographic method development the biggest drag. Takes ages

I am in the humanities and therefore I guess it's pretty different, but so far (I started in October) I have covered about 20% of the primary sources I plan to look at and read about 90 articles and books as secondary literature (however they have been quite randomly selected and there are many areas in which by no means I have achieved a general overview). However I haven't started the writing process until the few last weeks and I've written about 10,000 words but I am currently still awaiting feedback from my supervisor so I don't know if they will be any good.

In general I think I now have a good understanding of some of the areas I want to cover, but in some other areas I'm completely lost.

I'm in social sciences - done a lot of reading but feck all actual work (have officially written one sentence)

Started in oct in the social sciences and have done a couple of essays and reviews, gathering sources together but havnt actually got anything on paper directly for the thesis. Hoping it will all fall into place for upgrade!!!

I'm nearly at the 6 month point as well. My supervisor is expecting lots of lovely results already. The problem is she doesn't seem to understand that what I'm doing is very time consuming, and sometimes doesn't even work at all. I spent most of Monday fixing a machine that someone else broke before I could use it. Now I have the data, the computer is complaining it doesn't have enough memory to reconstruct the images. arggghh

Being a CASE student, I have loads of pressure from all different departments:(

Six months in; i have written up various minute meetings, 2 literature reviews, loads of reading of articles, travelling up north for conferences etc, networking with various people around the uk who are doing similar projects to me, and im also constantly in meetings which go on for about 3 hours most of time! So im busy and very tired!