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First, you need to have a specific area in which you want to get a particular graduate degree. Each graduate program at MIT (and elsewhere) admits separately, so the specific criteria and competitiveness of application are different between a PhD in chemistry and a master's in aerospace engineering.
For most science and engineering graduate programs, your background in research and/or engineering design and your letters of recommendation from faculty members will be the most important components of your application, so it's useful to start research and to cultivate relationships with professors starting as early as possible. Doing research will also hopefully help you narrow your professional interests, so you can apply to graduate programs which best fit your interests.
Obviously, GPA and GRE scores are also important, but given the choice between perfect stats and no research and fabulous research but less-stellar stats, grad programs tend to prefer the latter.
Finally, as a freshman, it's too early to restrict your graduate school aspirations to a single school. Graduate work is mostly about doing research on a particular subject, so it's best to apply to departments that have professors doing work that interests you. School-wide prestige and school-wide community are of very little consequence for graduate students.
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