[valkyrie]

It's very easy to freak out at the beginning of law school. I remember sitting in a Mexican restaurant my first week, having dinner, and then I thought -- OMG, what am I doing here at a restaurant when I should be home, reading? Yeah, I got over that pretty quickly.

It is scary around exam time, first sememster freshman year. My first final was criminal law, and the class sucked. We had a new professor who usually showed up for class looking like he had slept in his clothes, in the car, and ran class like a talk show, asking "Well, what do YOU think about that?" and bragging about the guy he prosecuted in New York for smuggling drugs in his shoes. His exam was this horribly convoluted fact pattern involving Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, and of course the ultimate question was which people can be charged with which crimes (and then you have all the people standing around in the hallway after class, doing the law school version of "tent talk" admitting that they were charging dead people with crimes). I left the building convinced that I was going to flunk out of law school because I just didn't know what I was doing and lived in terror until grades were posted. Of course, I did fine, but I always did get the freak outs waiting for grades. It *is* super stressful when your entire grade for a whole semester is determined by only one exam...but as long as you prepare and set three alarm clocks and arrange a wake up call for exam day (my number one fear was oversleeping and missing a test entirely) everything will be good.