Starting with FPGA boards

Or you might want to investigate MathWorks (the MATLAB/SIMULINK) folks and their HDL-CODER (google: mathworks hdl coder).

You can express your algorithms at a high level in MATLAB/SIMULINK, and then generate HDL code (verilog or VHDL) for the design.

If you are a software / control systems person, and not a hardware FPGA designer, this might be a good way to go.

The 'student' pricing is very reasonable for your explorations as a 'student', but a full commercial license for the tools is $$$$ (like Quartus Lite vs full license).

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with MathWorks, just familiar with their products.