I was under the impression that a student pilot, without a private pilot certificate, could not log PIC while flying wtih an instructor. i.e. when flying your pviate pilot training cross country flights with an instructor, the student pilot cannot log PIC.
Now, I am working on my instrument rating and am doubting how I have previously logged cross county PIC time. In my case, I have 3.6 hours CC with an instructor from my private training. I did not originally log this as PIC. I am trying to figure out if it should/can be counted towards my 50 hour CC PIC requirement for my instrument rating. It's not a ton of hours, but everything helps.
The reason I began to question my understanding is that you can concurrently apply for your private certificate and instrument rating. This would imply that you could build all 50 hours of required CC PIC time while only being a student pilot.