need help on JDBC related stuff

I'm doing a project and I need to access the attributes of a table through Java.

For example, if I have a table in the database that stores student information and it has attributes name, lastname, student number, grades.

I know how to access the data for each student but I need a way to access the actual attributes (ie name, lastname, student number, grades.)

It is because I am also designing a JAVA GUI which needs the attributes of the table.

so in a nutshell, what i need is:

how can I use java to access the attribute names themselves of a table in the database?

Thanks a lot.