Workshop submission by a first year student, does it count?
Does it count as having a paper


That depends on the workshop.  Your submission counts as a (peer-reviewed, published) paper if and only if 


The submission is an actual manuscript, and not just a short (few-paragraph) abstract, AND
Your submission is accepted by the committee after significant review by your peers (the workshop committee)
After some revision, the manuscript will be made available to the public in some persistent form, either paper or electronic, that can be found many years in the future by someone who did not attend the workshop.


Many workshops fail all three of these conditions—submissions consist of only few-paragraph abstracts, which are lightly reviewed by the committee (to eliminate obvious garbage), and which are printed verbatim onto paper handouts that are distributed at the conference, but never made public elsewhere.

This may be a language issue, but a "workshop proposal" doesn't sound like a paper describing your own research, but rather a proposal for a workshop that you want to organize, either for other people to present their research, or to collaborate on new research, or both.  Organizing a workshop could be valuable experience and a positive point on your CV, but it does not count as a "paper".