PSA: get off tutorial island as fast as you can.
I think it's some kind of hazing to see if the game is for you before you reach our communist utopia and run off with our copper axes.
Weather effects on the island are a little weird too. Fog is a little 'bugged', keeps you from discovering new tiles. Rain and storms make moving around a lot harder, slower, causes injury at least until you level up pathfinding.
If you want spoilers, there's a full recipe list on Discord. But you'll need it anyway later, just the way you need the wiki to enjoy DF.
For those who are in the main game who don't know what to do, there's a few archetypes:
1. Crafter and resource gatherer. This is pretty common. You probably have to collect resources yourself so you might end up say a high level hunter+leatherworker, farmer+tailor, miner+smelter+smith.
2. Researcher. There's also a lot of overlap with crafter as you often have to make your own parts and need a high level of skill to unlock recipes. But the difference is that you might lock yourself out of some recipes to narrow down possibilities. For example, I avoid doing anything with nails and parts above copper until I can figure out all the copper recipes.
3. Fighter. We need lots of animal parts for crafts and research. Wolves and snakes are easy enough, but bears and dire wolves need some specialists and teamwork. It's one of the more active roles. There's dungeons too and we haven't gone very deep in them, but they've turned out nice things like nails and metal helmets.
4. Explorers. Most of the world is still unexplored. Swamps, caves, and mountains are difficult to cross. There's also a very high chance of dying, so the crafters won't risk it. This is much lower activity than a dedicated fighter.
Crafter niche might be broken down into more parts:
Clothier - really vital as clothing gives substantial boosts
Farming - very low activity but impactful, might be fun if you're just here to socialize
Animal breeder - tame and feed chickens, rabbits, etc
Carpenter - we use tons of wood for everything from tools to research and buildings.
Smith - this is probably the deepest, most difficult one to master. We've only scratched the surface on this, and need a much stronger metal industry
Smelter - normally smiths multiclass as smelters but there's plenty of room to specialize here. Make ingots for others and specialists are probably the only ones who can smelt gold
Cook - not so vital now because we don't have a big enough food industry, but cooks can give massive bonuses to the others
Miner - unlike woodcutting, mining is pretty risky, involving caves, mountains, monsters, and possible cave ins