I'm doing some research for my undergraduate thesis and it feels like every time I have an idea I go looking for literature and find that someone else published a paper answering almost the exact question like 10 years ago. I know an undergrad thesis isn't supposed to be some ground breaking nobel prize winning research, but it is so frustrating feeling like any idea I have someone beat me to decades ago.

I'm interested in analyzing the effects of Texas' 10% automatic admissions law, and specifically how it impacts student behavior (behavior in the economic sense, not the discipline sense necessarily) in high schools, as at first most research I read focused on the returns in college attendance and future wages. My first thought was to see if it impacted how students allocate effort in high school - do students "strategize" under a system that explicitly rewards high GPAs? A paper answering this exact question almost was written in 2012 and a more theoretical paper in 2023. Then I was thinking about competition based around the law and if that impacts mental health, but I don't even know if that counts as economics, and I don't have an interest in health economics or psychology so I'm scared to go down that route and then be stuck there, and it feels like im grasping at so many straws to have even some sort of research paper that I'm just asking for bad results and then I can just throw out the whole project. Is it enough to find a paper and tweak something small? Like apply a similar method as one paper but with a different outcome variable (ie. one paper uses course difficulty, but I want to use homework time and class attendance, which was used in another paper but for a different analysis). Does that count as real research or just copying? I feel like such an imposter just trying to feel like someone who belongs in a research environment. The only other idea I have is to see if this law hurts students far away from the cutoff, since research seems to focus on students above the cutoff or near the cutoff, or if it fosters 'intellectual segregation' in schools, where high achieving students do better, but at the detriment of their peers, but that barely feels like a valid question that is even possible to research, nor is it probably even interesting enough to be worth looking into, and even if so, it's probably been researched. It feels impossible to get a grasp on a concrete research question that doesn't feel so fluid and impossible and all the data is so impossible to collect that i doubt these projects are even feasible

It baffles me that researchers still manage to find these huge research topics to write groundbreaking papers on - I can't tell if it's a genuine struggle to find a research topic or I'm just not cut out for research. I have ideas but it feels like every time I find a paper that ruins my idea I have to start completely over and I'm losing time.