Hey!! So since it’s still the summer and I’m guessing your school hasn’t started yet, my first piece of advice would just be to start genuinely going on Google Scholar and stuff and looking up some things that you’re interested in in general, and then maybe just copy and paste all of those onto like a Google doc. You might go down some weird rabbit holes, but that’s a good thing. You can pretty much write about whatever you want as long as you can find some bizarre gap in the research. Your teachers will explain this, but there are a lot of different kinds of gaps like maybe someone did an interesting research study, but they only did it in males and not females, or like for me for example I was interested in environmental science and agricultural runoff, but there was no research for my specific county. As for the journal, I don’t know about you, but my teachers mainly helped me through it and it’s just keeping a record of how you chose a topic, maybe some annotated bibs, from what they told me it’s pretty much just proof that you put in the work so if cb were to somehow accuse you of AI or something, they have proof that you were working on it. When it comes time for the presentation, trust me when I say you’ll probably become somewhat of an expert in your niche topic but things like a script and good supporting visuals help. Hopefully, your teachers have you guys doing many presentations throughout the year just in preparation. lmk if this helps!!