Being realistic when applying w.r.t. funding

[Casper14]

Hi all

How did you go about choosing the programs that you would like to attend, while simultaneously remaining realistic as to your chances of admission? I have heard that most programs consider the GRE only as part of your application and thus as more of a cutoff than a deciding factor.

I wrote the GRE today, and my (unofficial) scores were 160 for verbal and 162 for quantitative. This is slightly lower than I was hoping for, but I do not think I can really complain, as I only studied for one week. My problem is that every application is costing me a considerable amount of money (and paying in USD with ZAR can really hurt your pocket!). Also, if I do not get funding through a TA or RA position, it will be very unlikely that I can attend. Therefore I would like to choose a relatively small amount of programs to apply to while also maximising my chance of funding at those universities.

My top choices of programs to attend are currently Computer Engineering at UC Berkeley, UT Austin, UW Seattle and UC San Diego.

So my question is, should I lower my sights in order to raise my chance of funding? Is it even easier to get funding at lower-ranked universities?

Thanks for any insight!