I'm going to have to disagree, I think this is a great opportunity for you to get started working with the tooling, and begin to get your hands dirty with the technology (apps, tweaking the miners, playing with overclocking, posting on forums, etc.).

I started out just about 3 weeks ago with a couple of 7870 GHz editions that I found on craigslist for $180.00, slapped them into some old HP desktops that I had laying around the office, and got them pulling ~420 MH/s each with minimal heat (running stable @ ~60c).

I also added a 5770 pulling 210 MH/s ($65.00 on craigslist) , and then later a pair of 7970s (1 @ 150.00, 1 @ 300.00 on craigslist) each doing ~600MH/s.

So for an investment of 700.00 over a 3 week period, I'm pulling down ~1850 MH/s, all running at my office under my desk without anyone else in the office even knowing they exist.