I cannot upvote this enough. I made this mistake when I applied for schools for undergrad, applying only to Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, and Columbia - Col

I cannot upvote this enough. I made this mistake when I applied for schools for undergrad, applying only to Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, and Columbia - Columbia was meant to be my backup school as I had a family friend who was a professor in the physics department (who also was a Caltech alum) who wrote a positive letter of recommendation for me (my declared intended major was physics). Turned out my being overly humble in not listing the plethora of awards I received combined with colleges losing significant money from the Enron scandal resulted in me being waitlisted or rejected from all the schools I originally applied to. My case spread like wildfire in the NYC tristate area as one of the high profile rejections that happen every year or so. In my case, it turned out that my force of character, will, and intelligence carved out an extremely good career so far without having the kind of connections that people from schools like Harvard and Stanford might have - is that a risk you would like to take though?