I am from the Northeast and am in undergrad in the area now as well, and I wanted to stay here, so I applied to 10 of the closest schools (excluding the New York City schools, because I didn't want to live there). I looked at the required prerequisites for all the schools and whether or not they would accept you without having completed some. I am an out-of-major student and have completed many prereqs online but not a full major. If the school had a lot of random prereqs and wouldn't accept you without them (i.e. UMass Amherst), I didn't bother applying. I also made sure that at least some of the schools I applied to had a relatively high acceptance rate for this field, i.e. around 30%.