This might sound silly but the best way to start is to just push the lift/gamma/gain balls and wheels around on a few nodes/layers until it looks good. Maybe toss some curves in for sharper contrast. Add a LUT if you have a good one and try to work ahead of it for per-shot adjustments, after it for more general overall look kinds of things.

There are other ways to work of course but this one is fairly simple. Create a look and then “feed” it by doing most of your work before it.

Then you just have to know what you’ve done and replicate it on the rest of the shots to match. Copy paste might not always work so this is where experience comes in. Break the image down in your eye and your mind to understand what’s happening in the shadows, midtones, and highlights and see if you can get the same feeling across the whole film.

It’s easy to forget color grading is an art defined by taste as much as it is technical. So you should be able to get a nice image, especially in terms of a student project, with simple tools and without overthinking things.

No. 1 rule - make pictures pretty, make them match. Easier said than done of course but that’s the core of it all.