This study addresses the challenge of selecting research topics for undergraduate students, focusing on computer science, by evaluating a recommendation model based on the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm (kNN). The objective is to enhance the accuracy of research topic recommendations in the presence of imbalanced data. The methodology involves data cleaning, transformation, and correlation-based feature selection, with a particular focus on addressing missing values and optimizing the feature set. The Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) is employed to balance the dataset. The model development includes a comprehensive analysis of various k values, leading to the identification of k=3 with Manhattan distance as the optimal configuration, achieving an accuracy of 82%. The experiment explores different training data proportions, revealing that a 90:10 ratio yields the highest accuracy. This study incorporates a Grid Search technique for hyperparameter tuning, highlighting the importance of selecting appropriate distance metrics and nearest neighbor values. The system implementation is presented with user and administrator interfaces. Findings indicate varying model performance across research categories, emphasizing the need for category-specific evaluation metrics. The study concludes with a discussion on the significance of the results, which contribute to the improvement of research topic recommendation systems for students through the integration of advanced machine learning techniques.