Nowhere to Go

By the end of this summer, ideally I should have completed my Research Proficiency Exam. But the fact is, I just do not know what to do. I feel like I don't have time to think about research, instead I'm just "hacking" the existing tools. As the codebase of the existing tool is quite large and almost zero documentation, life is hard. In order to know the method call chain I used the debug mode and see where the program execution goes. I do not know if I break the tool, I do not know if I'm doing it correctly or not.  Another fundamental problem is about the annotated data. Every time I look at it, I feel bad. The data is annotated with a strange way, a lot of conversion to be done and many other things that make me feeling so bad. I wish I know how to fix it,  but I just don't. I'm feeling I don't have progress and just circling around the same stuff again, again, and again.

If I look at other PhD students here, most of them already have the data and they can just start playing with it, try out different algorithms etc. They focus on the solution and not to how to clean the data or transform the data into an appropriate format. I feel like we already made a mistake from the beginning of the annotation. Perhaps because nobody is really familiar with the topic from the beginning. 

Hmm, I do not know what to do.