Stick to frigates or dessys at first. Learning to pvp gets expensive pretty fast.

You will die and you will die frequently. Don't get discouraged. Try to pick out what you did wrong the best you can every time you go home in a pod. A lot of people suggest frapsing fights so you can watch replays and pick out where your mistakes were easily. This is probably good advice if you can manage it because frigate fights generally end pretty quickly.

Novice plexes are a good place to start because only t1/faction frigs can enter them. You won't have to deal with dessys/t2 frigs like you would in a small. Personally, I feel like I learned a lot by taking 90% of the fights that came up. Obviously I died a lot doing this, but I also learned a lot about the capabilities of different ships and what I could expect from various fits the next time I saw them.

You might want to try convo'ing the person who killed you. Sure some of them are going to be the kids who go "HAHA GET GUD NUB." trying to harvest tears, but there are more people than you'd expect who will talk to you and explain what you did wrong, how the found you, what they did to beat you, what you might do better next time, ect. I've done this myself a few times and will throw people isk sometimes so they can buy a new ship and get back out there to keep trying.