Pick a consumer product and design next years model or the design a family of products with the same design language to be released 5 years from now.
Small kitchen appliance, power tools, CE, etc.
I often see “blue-sky” projects with tons of research, charts and graphs but not enough designing. The past few years I’ve been telling students & new grads to design their own products as a personal project. Buy a coffee maker and improve on it. Take it apart and try to re-use as many of it’s internal components. Take a look at the molded parts and how it comes together, etc. Then maybe you can do the coffee maker, blender & toaster following your new design language. If done right and complete it will show your research, ideation, refinement, cad, prototyping?, etc. It will also show your level of ideation & design sensibility.
Good luck