I'm in my final year of college and I remember being in your exact situation 2 years ago. In my view you can adopt 2 strategies at this stage.

You need to understand the protocol first, and reading Satoshi's orginal paper, or any of the easier options is essential. It also helps a lot to understand the conceptual differences between bitcoin and other currencies like Ripple and Peercoin.

If your intention is to learn as much about the bitcoin implementation as possible, I would suggest you give up on bitcoin-core and shift to one of the python implementations. Now, there are a few quirks about the python implementations, but your learning would be much faster and you'd be in a much better position to understand the cpp code later.

If you want to stick to bitcoin-core, and are willing to tolerate a steep learning curve, there are still a few resources to sweeten it. You need to understand that it's not just cpp that you need to master to understand bitcoin core, but a lot of the GNU build system, the makes and the autoconfs and such stuff.

Now to help you understand the structure of the code in src, you could check this out.

Edit (7:7:2016):A lot of the new discussions in the bitcoin:core world, revolves around the CPP language itself. CPP itself undergoes considerable change every 4 years and there are many discussions around which CPP language features can be implemented/ incorporated into bitcoin-core. So it is required that you have a thorough understanding of CPP along with new language features that keep getting added, and their relations to the previous features.