My advice would be to ask as many questions as you need to. I certainly spent a bit of time in my first year going round in circles because I was a bit embarrassed to ask for help and admit I wasn’t sure what I needed to do. Make sure you don’t dedicate all your time to work. The PhD process is pretty intense, and you need to make sure you look after yourself too, so make sure you have downtime where you can relax.
I’ve learnt that I’m more resilient that I realised; there have been so many times where an experiment has gone wrong, or I’ve spent weeks planning it for it to then not work at all and while these times are difficult, I’ve gotten quite good at just going “Okay that didn’t work. I’ll try this instead.” Even when it’s the third of fourth time it happens…
In five years’ time, I hope to be a Senior Research Scientist working in industry. I really enjoyed my time working with recombinant proteins and doing work with DNA so I think I’d like to head back to that area.