Try this out. I have a few friends come to me asking for a PC build for under $1000. I beefed up a few parts of it for you, and the motherboard is a bit pricy, but I think this would do you well. It costs $1100 without the peripherals, so if you plan on buying a monitor, rather than plugging into an already owned TV or something, getting an expensive keyboard/mouse, school won't give you an OS and you want to pay for it, etc... then I'd downgrade the case first, motherboard second, and GPU if you absolutely must.
Overall, I prefer:
-Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler (this massive fan that is silent: just need to be careful how tall your RAM chips are)
-EVGA GeForce GTX GPUs
-i7s are nice (and I've got one), but i5s are fine
I'd love some critique from other PC builders here. It's essentially a cheapened version of my personal parts preference, aside from the GPU.
Other than that, OP, building a computer is not much more complicated than figuring out how to plug cords in the right places. The only thing that makes it seem so daunting is how scary working with expensive hardware can be.
Building My Own Gaming PC