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If this is your first solo project, be nice to yourself and use a dataset provided by your professor (if possible) or from one of the sources listed at Browse Data for Projects (best bets from there are below). Experienced data collectors produce the cleanest and easiest to use data files. All the major software packages will open/import files in SPSS, Stata, or SAS formats, so download the file for your software if you can, or any of the others if you cannot.
Always download and read the documentation that comes with it to find variables of interest (note the variable name) and to learn about the population that was surveyed. Also, look for information about how missing or implausible values are represented.
These have smaller datasets on interesting topics. The General Social Survey is also great, but is quite big unless you use the tools to select your variables before downloading
It takes time to collect good data, from designing and pilot testing the questionnaire to recruiting a large and representative sample. If you are doing a data analysis project in one semester, time is the one thing you don't have. Thus, you will probably be doing convenience sampling, which restricts generalizability.
If you are doing a longer project and need to collect data, check out our longer Collect Data with a Survey guide.
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