Unless there's no one near by selling.  As in my case.  :-(

Seriously, buying and selling from an exchange is the easy part. 

Investing is a great idea.  But you need to register with an exchange ASAP in order to fund with fiat... the reputable exchanges have a backlog for verification purposes. 

Reading the market (if you want to day trade) is the hard part, and I seriously suggest against it unless you know what you're doing. 

Storing BTC can be quite tricky.  Best area to start is to download the BTC client on your own machine to have your own wallet.  Once you get comfortable you can look into further options like brain wallets, paper wallets and other offline methods of storing BTC.

Good luck in your endeavor.  Don't give up.  This all seems daunting, but its just one puzzle piece at a time.

Everyone says this, but really its true:  You're better off buying some BTC in cash from an exchange rather than investing in an ASIC that you won't get for months on end.  By the time you do, as mentioned above, the difficulty will be so high that there's no guarantee you'll ever meet ROI. 

That's not to say mining isn't profitable.  For some, it certainly is.  But this was Satoshi's brilliance.  The market will self-regulate between profitability in mining and not mining via difficulty level.

Good luck with it!  I like the idea... always a huge supporter of research, esp BOINC.