The designation of T-10 is misleading. The most important issues are whether a colleges is a good fit, and whether you can afford it, and these are not used as factors in any ranking system.
So, when deciding whether a colleges is a good fit, academically, look at the stats of the students who are being accepted to those colleges. Mid 50% unweighted GPAs of students accepted to Berkeley is 3.89-4.00 and to UCLA it is 3.91-4.00. UT Austin and GTech aren’t much lower.
The colleges you mention are also all very selective. Acceptance rates of UCB and UCLA are 14% and 15%, respectively. OOS acceptance for UT Austin and GTech aren’t much higher.
So the chances of being accepted with an unweighted GPA of, say, 3.5 to colleges like GTech or Berkeley are extremely low. The problem is that you will be competing for acceptance to these colleges with students who have similarly rigorous academics, but have GPAs that are above 3.8.
A GPA of 3.5 is excellent, and way above average. However, there are some 50-75 colleges which rarely accept unhooked students with GPAs under 3.8. Luckily, there are hundreds of excellent and wonderful colleges which do accept students with these GPAs.
Based on your GPA, these colleges don’t really look as though they will be very good fits for you. The students at these colleges aren’t better than you, nor are they particularly smarter than you. They simply have better abilities in the narrow field of “doing well in a classroom setting”. These colleges are geared towards serving these types of students. These colleges are only “the best” for students for whom they are a good fit. For anybody else, they are far from “the best”.
Stop mooning over colleges based on their rankings in the USNews, or however the colleges have managed to market themselves. Start looking for a college where you will feel comfortable, a colleges at which you will succeed and thrive.