Finding a good active corporation is one of the best ways to progress in the game, no matter your goal. They will do things like have mining fleets going with boosts, will be able to provide you fitting and skillplan advice, compress or haul ore for you, and you’ll be able to build some bonds with players in a way not possible on the forums.
Mining tends to scale with people at a certain point, but it can be done solo. At that point, it is more for the fun of “try to survive” than the profitability. Taking a Venture to low sec and seeking out Crokite / Dark Ochre anomalies, for example. Learning to speed tank any rats so you can be slippery and take your ore back to hi sec.
I recommend against sitting alone in hi sec as a new capsuleer and thinking the road to riches is paved in Rich Plagioclase. To try to coax people out of that rut, I spent a week offering free public mining boosts in Heimatar at one point. Sadly, for every Venture that joined, there were 5 that were scared and warped away to another belt in the same system to continue sitting alone, mining. 