Hard agree- and worth spending a bit of time exploring in order to authentically articulate your interests/goals in essays or interviews etc.
Also, I may have missed it, but how does class rank look? Some big CA schools have 100 kids with 4.0UW and similar rigor and they don’t all get into UCB for CS. You said it’s an average rated public, so maybe not an issue but if there are dozens of classmates with same or slightly higher rank who are also applying CS at top UCs, might make a difference in chances.
Edited to add- if that is your real name, you should change your username for confidentiality