As many have said, train for a goal and you'll attain it in 1-2 months. You'll be able to fly alot of the cool ships within a few months and be near parity with 5 year players on alot of craft.
The thing that cuda says is true, you're years from hopping into the 'big' ships, but those ships are soo redickulously expensive and generally un-fun to fly (too expensive, need TONS LOTS HUGE amount of support--just to move even--that you shouldnt worry about flying them)
The thing about EVE is this: training is done realtime, 24/7 via a clock-like expirence system. The levels go from 0-5. To use most advanced 'items' (modules, ingame) all you need is level 4 in the skill. Skills have 'ranks' attributed to them, the higher the rank (17 is the highest I think) the longer the training process. With OK skills, a rank 1 skills takes a mere 16min to train to level 1, hour or so for 2, around 6+ for 3, less then a day for 4.
Its the level 5 thats what sets you apart from the ancient players and yourself. Level 5 for that rank 1 would take around 4 days...longer then the first 4 combined. That ratio only gets worse the higher the ranks go.
Its these level 5 skills that form the VAST BULK of older players SP (skill points).
As an example, Im aprrox 3.5 years old ingame and have almost 50mill SP @ 183 individual skills learned. Of those 183 skills I have (you have to buy the skills, then train them) 57 of those skills are at level 5. Just training level 5, a single level of training on only a third of my skills, comprises 70% or so of my total SP.
Those level 5 trains only give me about 5% advantage over a level 4 pilot in the same skill. That's it. Years more of training and I only have a couple stats that net me 5% more damage or whatever.
That said, some advanced ships and weapons require lvl5 in some skills, but alot of that training can be had in about 5 months, something thats near parity with other endgames in otehr MMO's. All the while though, you're not grinding exp, but cash and fighting against a real enemy...normally somewhere in Europe. (Fuck bulgarians btw)
So eya, sign up.