I definitely don't want to be a jack of all trades. Right now the most attractive thing to me looks like frigate hulls. The Slasher is my favorite ship so far, and I like EveUni's pages on Interceptors and AFs and the like. I definitely want to try PvP combat somewhere down the line, but, I think I'm going to avoid it until I have a decent bundle of skill points.
First off, welcome to Summit and to New Eden in general!
If I could give one single piece of advice to you as you're just starting out, it is to never, ever think ^^^ that way. Apart from burning out, the biggest Eve subscription killer is psyching yourself out too much and putting things you want to do off until you're "ready for them". Eve is a game that, by the very nature of its progression system, won't ever make you feel like you're "ready". There's always more to train, that next ship to fit, and if you hide in high sec hauling or mining while you wait, you're going to get bored and quit before you do anything you actually want to do. It'll make you feel like this game isn't "for you." Unless you love high sec and/or hauling and mining, and in that case keep doing what you're doing!
If you're looking for small gang frigate combat with a low SP threshold for usefulness, I would advise you to do some research on Faction Warfare. Because the FW plexes (the nodes that you fight over) are only accessible by activation gates with ship restrictions, you can be extremely effective early on as a frigate pilot because you can be reasonably sure the enemy won't drop anything too big on you for you to handle. The novice FW plexes
only allow T1 frigates, so there will never be a point in FW where you will feel like you can't do anything just because you're in a frigate. Also, training for the T1 logistics frigates allows you to contribute even if your support skills are total garbage and your DPS sucks, if you don't just want to be in a flying warp disruptor, which is still vital but can be a bit dull. FW plexing is also highly profitable, albeit extremely boring if there's no one around to fight.
But there are other options besides Faction Warfare! I'm likely biased because it was my first and semi-current Eve career (this character is my main, about two months old, has been an effective PvPer for most of that time). But honestly, you can be helpful just about anywhere. Null sec alliances need fast tackle as much as FW fleets do, and while you're waiting to skill up you can make a boatload of ISK just fitting a Salvager to your frig and scavenging the wrecks of the massive fleet battles. Null sec alliances are also usually obnoxiously rich, so they'll be able to set you up nice from the moment you join just because they can afford to treat all new members that way.
Honestly, the only career path I would advise you don't try to tackle immediately after the tutorial stuff is wormhole space, as the bare necessities for survival in that environment have a higher SP threshold than usual. But hell, if you were to train up your exploration skills, honestly a wormhole corp would probably take you just for the dedicated scanning character, if you can manage to convince them you're not a spai considering your character is pretty new.
Anyway, I hope that was in some way helpful and/or interesting to you. Welcome to the last MMO you'll ever play, look forward to seeing you in Summit and fly safe!
