What is drama? And what is theatre? What are the differences between the two? This seems to be the most important starting point for someone beginning a drama course.
The clearest difference I can think of is:
Drama is the process, something that is ongoing and theatre is a) a place and b) the finished product, a performance in front of an audience.
Thus ‘drama’ can cover rehearsals and work up to a performance and also the process of learning. You might hear of a written play-text called a ‘drama’ too. If you think of this playtext as something that is still in embryo - something that has to have a lot of input before it becomes a finished piece performed before an audience, then you will see that the play text - the ‘drama’ - is also something that is ongoing, unfinished. This is something to bear in mind if you are studying a play as part of an English course; a play is always meant for performance. Playwrights will differ in the amount of information they give about characters and staging; all playwrights recognise that the writing of the play is only the first part of what will then be a process of creation involving large numbers of people - actors, designers, director - before it becomes a finished entity and consequently a piece of theatre.
So, too, a student studying the subject is a ‘drama’ student. The student is in process, not a finished product, and studying what leads up to and makes theatre via exploring and understanding the process, performance spaces and the finished product which takes place in such a space.