How is the typical first day at college like?

College orientation and moving into dorms occurs before the first day of classes. On that first day of classes you'll find students feeling their way. They are filled with trepidation, unfamiliarity with the buildings, the room numbers, where the elevators are, etc. Kids walk into the rooms and first size up the room, then look for their seat. Some want to be up front,many in the back, others want to be near a bolt hole.

Your teachers don't typically have huge lessons on the first day, but that's going to vary. Usually the first day of classes are handing out the syllabus and going over it, explaining the lessons and any other quirks of the class (one teacher of mine had one person start the day with reading lyrics of a song that had personal meaning to them.) Some teachers will explain their teaching style ("50% of you will drop this class before the first midterm" sort of thing), some will get right into the introductory lesson after handing out the syllabus. You can pretty much do whatever you want your teacher to do. Do you want them to be fun and carefree (which usually leads to a class being harder to get into) or harsh and tough to weed out the people who aren't serious? You can pretty much work around what you want them to be like.

Your character would already know when and where the class is supposed to be, although it's questionable if he knows physically where the class is. He would have signed up for the time of the class when he registered. He might have found his classroom ahead of time if he's smart, or he could have arrived early. If he's not prepared, he'll be rushing around trying to find where the heck the classroom is. If he's living on campus, he would have moved in a few days ago.

Some schools start you off with an introduction to college course that may have been his first "class" before classes really started. Look up your school and see if that's something they do for incoming freshmen.

A school like NYU goes to a lot of trouble to get incoming students settled, oriented and socialized before classes start. The first day of classes is the culmination of an onboarding process that's probably been going on for several months.

NYU has a lot of information about their freshman "welcome week" programming. Here's the main page.

Here's some information about freshman dorms & the assignment process. And here's a student perspective on pros & cons of specific freshman dorms.

Fine Arts/Archaeology is not, btw, an available major at NYU. There's a graduate-level program in the History of Art and Archaeology at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. As an undergraduate, your character would need to work with both the Dept of Art History and the Dept of Anthropology. Again, NYU has a lot of information online about its academic programs.

Yep, I was about to talk about Welcome Week but ben beat me to it. Big schools have lots of orientation before the first official day. When 17 and 18-year-olds are coming in, things should be as organized as poss.

Go to the Website and look. Look for the Catalog, look at the student paper, look at the information on Residential Life. Search the site for "freshman orientation."

Look at the course descriptions (UK English course = U.S. English degree, often; course typically means a single class that meets several times a week).

Look at class syllabi too.

Incoming freshmen, like a lot of people mentioned, have often moved into campus about a week earlier, and have spent the last several days being part of organized activities intended to help familiarize them with their surroundings, put them in a good mood about the campus and the school, break the ice with other students so that they find a few friendly faces to start off with, get them over any melancholy from Change, and so on. There will usually be socials-- ice cream sundaes or floats-- visiting the stadium for a spirit rally-- you'll often be assigned to a Small Group to travel and lunch with so you don't get lost in the crowd-- frequently some kind of live entertainment and food several evenings. At my undergrad, the Alpha Phi Omegas (service fraternity) were usually tapped to be the small group leaders, although they weren't allowed to advertise themselves as such.

At my undergrad, it was mandatory for freshmen to live on-campus in the dorms. You weren't allowed to live off-campus until your sophomore year, but some of us-- like me-- who didn't have vehicles-- like me-- stayed in the dorms all four years. The first year, we got assigned a dorm and a roommate at random. If you're sticking around for your sophomore year, we had to find our own roommates and apply for the dorm we wanted, because we weren't allowed to stay in the freshman dorms. If you didn't have anyone you liked enough to live with, they also had mixers where other mehhh people could find a warm body to pair up with and claim a room together.

Class registration already happened. Because you're a freshman, you're at the bottom of the priority list. At our school, seniors and honor students got first whack at the schedule back in, say, April; then juniors; then sophomores. The logic behind it is that the seniors are very limited in which classes they need to build their schedule, so they want to make sure those last classes in the right time slots don't get full before the seniors get a chance to sign up. The further down you go, the more flexibility people have in their schedules in being able to make things work out, so their priority is less. The incoming freshmen are total blank slates for their classes, so it's easiest for them to figure out something to get their first 9-12-15-16 hours. You have an advisor, and you're not allowed to sign up for anything that first year without their say-so. At my undergrad, high school seniors can't register until they are (a) accepted, and (b) made their deposit, and (c) advised. Advising takes the holds off your account, and you're able to register by phone or online if you can't register in person. Acceptance letters often go out in December/January, so April/May signups are pretty realistic.

By the time you get to the first day of actual class time, you're relatively familiar with your surroundings, but if the campus is particularly sprawling, it can still be difficult to find the right building within the timeframe every day that first week. It can be like "Uh... I know I found my building with no problem on Tuesday... why am I so mixed up on Thursday?" Lots of consulting the schedule and/or the map, and lots of paranoia that you've spaced out on the wrong class, or that you accidentally double-booked two classes for the same timeslot, or whatever, until your routine becomes embedded. At our university, we were generally MWF and T-Th classes. MWF were 50 minutes, and T-Th were about 80 minutes. Most classes were 3 hours towards our degree; language classes were 4 hours towards our degree; science was usually 3 hours with a lab for an extra fourth hour. A full-time undergrad student is at 12 hours, but someone who's double-majoring is going to take as many classes as possible (and transfer basics from the summer at the local community college or from high school dual-credit courses) in order to graduate on time.

In the classroom, the first day of class is pretty much going over each professor's ground rules, office hours, and syllabus, peppered with lots of anecdotes about former students of years past. The professor might say something like, "If it's more than 10 minutes after the bell rings, don't even bother disrespecting me by coming in late." Or, "I don't care how hot it is outside, I don't want to see anyone wearing halter tops in this class, do you understand? I remember there was this one girl who wore one, and we were in the middle of a test, and she decided to untie the neck on hers. It was really distracting to everyone around her, and I don't need distractions, period." Or, "These are my office hours. You can come by if you want to discuss your grade. But don't try to bribe me. There was this one kid who came in with rotten grades and he asked if he could have an A and he took off his Rolex and left it on my desk. And I'm like, 'Hey, don't forget your watch on the way out.' Because if I'm going to take a bribe, it had better be enough to allow me to retire, because I won't be able to work in my field again. So don't bother trying, okay?'"

For classes that involve composition or creation, your professor might ask you to write down the subjects of different things you did (papers written, art made, whatever) in high school. They'll cross-check it against future work and get mad at you if they think you've recycled bits of high school work for any of their classes. And then they'll write nasty notes. But a first-day person doesn't know that part yet.

If you have a particular real-life school in mind, definitely read up on their student handbooks for their specifics about what classes are necessary to graduate with a double-major BA in Archaeology and Fine Art. You can look at their maps, and their registrar schedules, and other Incoming Freshmen information packets to get your details right.