Hi there folks, as a second year PhD student, where am I supposed to be standing right now after 15 months of starting, I have already submitted my first year report which contains drafts of my literature, background, the main theory and hypothesis, in addition, I have already finished collecting my data for empirical work...I am a bit confused and don't know whether what I hve achieved is considered good or not, by the way am doing my PhD in Business, wis you all wondeful Christmas vacations, if you are going for one.

you should aim to complete the entire data collection until the end of the second year. IMHO you should aditionally produce full drafts of literature review and methods chapters until the end of the second year. That means at that point (after about 24-28 months) you should have about 50% of your thesis written down (not perfect but high standard and approved by advisor) and all data collected. That´s how I did it. The final year was then "sense-making" (which took me 4(!) months,analysis and write up (took me another 6 months).

Of course there are different ways to do this, also depending on the project itself so that is just based on my own experience.

thank you for your reply, yes, that is what am planning, although I already finished data collection, anyway, analysis will take longer in my case.