Your experiences resonated with me and reminded me about some of my own pre-college / early-college angst, fellow "Xennial"!

Although, in my case, my Guidance Department was utterly useless. I honed in on what I thought should be my "target campus" through my own research:

https://medium.com/checkmate11/why-it-took-so-long-for-me-to-graduate-from-college-612ec924e478