Is it okay to choose any topic before my thesis committee meeting?

You cannot just choose any topic for your thesis committee meeting, as it needs to be academically viable, but you can absolutely get this under control before next week. Your committee expects a topic that is narrow enough to research deeply and broad enough to have existing scholarly conversations you can join. Since you are worried about plagiarism, the best approach is to choose a topic where you can easily distinguish your own voice from your sources. Imagine you are passionate about how social media affects local voter turnout. Instead of copying sentences from a blog to explain a concept, you should write down the author's main idea in your own words right away, noting the website and date in your draft. If you find yourself pasting placeholder sentences, immediately highlight them in a bright color so you do not forget they are not yours, and then practice paraphrasing them by looking away from the screen and explaining the concept out loud as if you were talking to a friend. To prepare for your meeting and protect your academic integrity, you should take a few right now. First, narrow your broad political science interests down to a specific question, then search your university library database for peer-reviewed articles on that subject to see if there is enough data to support your writing. Next, schedule a quick visit to your campus writing center or email your professor to ask which specific citation style, like APA or Chicago, your department requires. They can provide you with a quick style guide that shows you exactly how to format both in-text citations and your bibliography. Finally, go through your current outline and replace every single copied placeholder with your own original summary, making sure to credit the original authors even if you are just summarizing their general ideas.