I am almost a year into my PhD and don’t know if I can honestly carry on. I’ve been given a set of structures to synthesise and then I will be testing them for certain properties as the main part of my project. However, only one person has successfully synthesised them before and the methods they have left are really confusing. I managed to make something that looked similar, and went on to test its properties to give a good basis for my confirmation review. However now I’ve submitted that it’s time to return to actually synthesising the correct structure, and I’m finding it completely impossible. I have tried to learn from my mistakes but I have now made incorrect structures 16 times (it takes a week to make them so I’m sure you can see my frustration when I get my spectra back at the end of the week to see I have wasted it all.) I feel like I could do the actual part of the project, the assessment of activity, but I can’t even test that because I just cant get the right structure made to test it. I’m struggling so much, I can’t say the project is failing because I can’t even get to the stage of testing if it is failing. I’m so tired and bored of doing the same synthesis every week and getting nothing in return. My supervisor is quite keen that I make this specific structure and i feel that I am running out of time to change to something else. How can I convince him that I can’t keep wasting my timeu on this stage of the project?