Should I sell my ore as it is, or refine it into minerals first?

It depends on your reprocessing skills and where you refine.

Refining (reprocessing) turns ore into minerals, but low skills and poor facilities lose a share of the yield. Many new pilots get more by selling the ore itself until their reprocessing skills are trained up.

Easiest path in GFVX: sell your ore to the corp buyback at 90% of Jita buy and keep mining. Train reprocessing over time, and ask our mining officers when it starts paying off for you.