Well, you have completed all but your dissertation. The only exam you'll ever have to take is the oral for your final defense.
In place of written or oral exams, you will have another challenge, a test of self-motivation. It is a complicated test, and grad students take a different version of it every day for about five years. Could you have learned all your undergraduate work without any exams, quizzes, or graded assignments except one giant final exam before you graduated? Only some people could have.
Many require exams, detested though they are, to motivate them to study and make roughly constant progress toward their degrees. In college, every course had a syllabus to guide students. Everyone knew what to study. On the contrary, grad students must find their own way.
Your 5-Year Plan
The great directionless abyss fortunately, can be filled, but grad students must fill it themselves. Taking a sign from college instructors, PhD candidate students can create a long-term syllabus for their research. This is a 5 -year plan for graduate school - give or a take a year or two.
The plan require to be adjusted later, but having a written plan when starting research will jumpstart most students' progress. Start creating a long-term research plan by breaking large projects into smaller ones. You have to set goals for each year and then for each month within each year. Make a schedule for each week of the first year, too. Fill with details as the weeks approach.
Create a mini version of this planning daily, too. Make an everyday "things to do" list, and check off tasks as soon as you complete them. Your list might include reading articles, obtaining library materials, setting up experiments, running experiments, computer work or even just thinking.
Five Tricks of the Trade
The way to a PhD is rarely a straight one and patience and perseverance are always advantageous. Despite field, research tends to have false starts and to move in both forward and backward directions before making net progress. Finally loose ends come together from which conclusions can be drawn.
| 
