Anxiety Pendulum

I've heard that a lot of your ultimate success in law school and subsequent law career depends on how well you perform in the first semester. The theory goes something like this:

Law firms come interviewing for summer internships in the middle of the second semester of that first year. Of course the best firms want the best students. They can only judge the (ahem) best students by their grades from their first semester. If a student is offered an internship after his first year, the same firm likely offers him a second internship the next year and ultimately a job at the end of school, regardless of his performance in the second and third years.

This amounts to a lot of pressure to do well immediately. To make matters worse, grades in law school are almost entirely based on your performance on one exam, the final. P-p-pressure.

My anxiety pendulum swings violently between confidence and nervousness. I'm hoping that a highly regimented routine of study and practice will keep that pendulum squarely on the side of confidence, but will that be enough to keep the pressure at bay?