Hi guys
After an unsuccessful interview, one of the members of the interview who is also my 2nd supervisor informed me to rewrite the 1st yr report. Besides, he gave me some suggestions for the rewriting. REWRITE, not revise! What he focused is that i should have a clear idea about the problem to solve in my PhD. But my 1st supervisor only asked me to think out the problem or the specific area all by MYSELF completely, without any instruction. I heard it's his style. Actually I've tried to find it very hard before, but you know i'm just a beginner in this field it's difficult for me to find problems all by myself. As a supervisor, isn't it my supervisor's responsibility to help me to confirm the problem I'm going to solve!

Currently, I've already lost all my confidence about my PhD, since I've been working on it for several days and lost all my confidence so far. I'll my 1st supervisor to ask for any specified problem or dedicated ones as opinions. Besides these, do you have any other suggestions?

Thank you!

Not to be critical, but it seems to me that you have not done enough ABCs about your work.

Try finding these highly-citied journal papers on your topic from top journals which have been published recently (e.g. within 3-10 years, depend on your area of research), and try reading them (especially the introduction parts of these papers) very carefully.

By doing this, you will get a good idea about whats going on there, and by then you should have already known the possible approaches to tackle the problems as well.

Btw, don't expect too much help from your supervisors, its too often that your supervisors basically have no idea about the topic you are doing (otherwise they wouldnt have been so keen to  pay you to do the work in the first place) and sometimes their "detailed" advices can be misleading (yes, it does happen, actually more often than you may think) which may even lead to potential viva disasters.

So just learn to work on your own and take "advices" from these highly-citied peer-reviewed journal papers, good luck.