Well, to be fair, how experienced are you at conducting independent research? If you're a typical college student, you're probably basically a novice with little knowledge of the literature in your field and limited experience performing the experiments. In that case, you really can't complain that you aren't being allowed to barge into someone's lab and start taking their research in an entirely new direction. Even beginning graduate students, in my experience anyway, do not have that kind of complete independence, because it takes time to get up to speed and become something of an "expert" in your field. As you get more experience and become a senior grad student, you do get more independence and more input into designing your projects also.
I can see where your coming from, but isn't your research such a big part of the admissions process? If I don't go to a really good school and don't get tacked onto some ground breaking stuff, I'd be at a disadvantage.
I think you misunderstand what graduate schools are looking for here. No one expects you to already be a PI as a senior in college, or even to publish a paper, let alone perform groundbreaking research before you even earn your bachelor's degree! What they do want to see is some consistency in your record (i.e., that you don't just work for a couple of months washing dishes in the lab and call that significant research experience) and some evidence of your POTENTIAL to be a researcher. Potential is based on aptitude a little bit, but it's mostly based on your work ethic. If you spend two years in a lab performing experiments as part of a larger project, and your PI writes you a LOR saying that you made a significant contribution at your level of training as a college student worker, and you can coherently explain to someone else (an interviewer!) why your research was important and what role you played in it, then you'll be in great shape. 🙂
I worked as a research assistant for ~1.5 years before I finished my ugrad degree. While some of the stuff my PI was doing was exciting (he designed a chemical treatment that protected from lung cancer), I didn't get published, I didn't write a poster, heck, I didn't even get to do much of my own work - I got TOLD what to do. And that experience helped me get into grad school, helped me get the project I wanted, I got contacts in the medical field, and I met people who radically changed my life for the better...so really, don't worry about choosing your project. In fact, even when you get into grad school (if that's where you want to go,) don't worry about your project. Worry about who's going to be a good mentor to you and who will show you the ropes. Yeah, you won't be solving incredible problems, but that time will come, once you've learned the basics of conducting quality research.
