I was wondering from other PhD students on a studentship with a project already predefined how much room within a PhD studentship should there be to find your own research path?
I'm asking because my experience so far with being able to find my own path has been dismal. I feel like anything that I may bring to the project that was not in the original studentship brief has not been supported by my lead supervisor yet they keep asking "what I want to research"? The ideas that I threw around the first 6 months, whilst I admit quite uniformed at times (I was only 6 months in!), were repeatedly wholly dismissed or unsupported. I gave up trying to develop any new paths and started to treat the research like a case of project management, which I must say was pragmatic if I wanted to finish in 3-4 years but a bit unfulfilling intellectually. Now I am working on developing method and thought that i might be able to find some space within the project to make it my own. After three months of bashing my head against a wall trying to develop a methodology that my supervisor finds suitable, I am resigning myself to undertaking the methods that were listed in the original brief.
So my question is, beyond getting a sense of what the experience of other students on a studentship is/was, what should my realistic expectations of a studentship be? Is it just a piece of project management bringing someone elses research plan into empirical fruitation?

It's interesting to read your post. My experience has been the complete opposite with my project changing so much it is unrecognisable. My topic and method etc are not even related to the original project. At this stage I would be delighted to have everything firmed up and be able to get on with planning data collection etc.
I know of other students in my school who have done the advertised project pretty much verbatim. Seems to depend on the supervisor.

My experience is the same in that my project is exactly as advertised to the letter. I guess the main reason for that being it was the proposal that was awarded funding by the research council.

My supervisors are the same as you - they like their students to use their methods.

Thank for your feedback Lydia, Kik and Tree.

I'm fine doing the project as listed but just wish that my supervisor would stop pretending like there is scope to do things differently. I wish they were just more up front about it. Now, how do I diplomatically tell them to stop asking "what is it that you want to research"?