Pivoting Labs

Hello, hoping to get some advice on a dilemma.

I'm a junior, undergraduate CS student planning to apply to masters programs in the same field. For the past few semesters, I've been in a public health lab, where I've mostly done applied work (using software packages to evaluate drugs). My fear is that public health research will add less to my application than "pure" CS research. Since research is time-consuming and rigorous, I don't want my efforts to go to waste.

I think I have two options: 1. To stay in my current lab, and probably first-author a paper in a Q1 public health journal next semester, third-author a review in another Q1 journal 2. To pivot to a robotics/LLM/NLP lab, where I can probably coauthor in a decent CS conference.

I have little knowledge of graduate admissions, so would appreciate your input.