Thank you everyone for all of your help. After talking to my counselor, visiting colleges, looking at various statistics, and talking to alumni and students of several colleges, I have come to a list that is or strongly resembles my final college list:
UPitt
PSU
GaTech
NYU
UIUC
JHU
CMU
Cornell
UPenn
MIT
Chicago
Rice
Reasoning: my counselor actually suggested not having target schools, and after thinking about it I thought it made sense. I would likely prefer penn state over most of the schools I had considered matches and penn state would also most likely cost less than them. I also realized that I would prefer a medium to larger college as well, so I removed the smaller schools. The others were chosen based on costs from net price calculators as well as schools I thought I might have a shot at based on our school’s Naviance.