First time building a drone

Hello all, to start things off, I am a junior in Aerospace Engineering, and while I haven’t taken any courses on the subject yet, I wanted to get a head start by making my own drone. The Ardupilot system sounds very interesting, and I want to try to work with it. Do you have any tips for getting started with Ardupilot, or drone building in general? At this point,the project is entirely in my head, I have not acquired any of the actual hardware yet, and this will be my first time working on something like this, but I would like to make use of arduino, and create most of the rest from scratch to learn how everything works. My hope is to complete this before summer is over. Anyways, beginners tips would be appreciated, and thanks for reading!

Moved to General area from Blog.