<p>You did get some bad advice–but it wasn’t about which schools to apply to.</p>
<p>You have the mistaken view that your acceptance to a highly selective university (where they spend mere minutes with each application) is tied to whether you are “good enough”. That’s just plain silly. You can be extremely well-qualified and destined for great things in life and not be admitted. You can’t take this stuff personally. They don’t know you. They spend a few minutes reading your application.</p>
<p>And random doesn’t mean that if you apply to enough places you will have a greater chance of getting in. It just means that there is no guarantee that a certain set of stats will yield a predictable result. So, yeah–maybe your applications were a bit generic and did not stand out. But that doesn’t make YOU generic.</p>