Not sure what might be the issue. I purchased a domain three days ago. A friend of mine said it took her a day for this step but I seem to be stuck at DNS propagation.
hi there, welcome.
In order to take a look, we’d need to know which domain and also which netlify instance you are trying to connect it to 
Hi, thanks for your help 
domain is philip-ryan.com and instance is https://flamboyant-joliot-64b8d1.netlify.com/
propagation was indeed still in progress. I flushed some caches at google’s DNS (as described in step 4 of the linked troubleshooting doc: DNS & HTTPS troubleshooting tips | Netlify Docs) and managed to get the certificate in place for you!