Applying to 17 schools??

There is another poster from CA who turned down UChicago and Cambridge (UK) for Dartmouth. Is profoundly unhappy with how insular, rural and cold it is, and is looking to transfer out. From the schools that poster is looking to transfer to, s/he seems a bit like you, OP: a very qualified student who is still really tied into the prestige of the school even though that approach failed the first time.

Please do yourself the favor of at least thinking through some of the most important variables. Other posters on this thread have pointed them out:

heavy core curriculum, v broader choices?
Big urban v Small urban v Suburban v Rural?
North v South?
Highly focused (HM, MIT, CalTech) or broader?

If you can’t sort the colleges into these broad categories just by looking at them, you don’t know enough about them to be applying to them.

If you haven’t though how much any of these categories matter to you, you don’t know enough about yourself to be applying to them. Obviously, you can’t know for certain about things you haven’t done- but you can think about how much that sort of thing tends to matter to you.

And note that those are easy, top-level categories. Here’s a harder one: although all of the schools on your list attract highly talented and motivated applicants, some of the schools on your list (JHU, MIT, Harvard come to mind) are more associated with highly driven students than others (say, Duke, Dartmouth, Yale, Vanderbilt, Penn). That is not a slam at either set- but perhaps one set is closer to you than the other?

As the other posters have said, the “why us” question is a good place to start shortening your list. Save at least $250 of your hard earned money for getting stuff for college. You will be glad to have it then!