This is not a complete list, just whatever I can think of for now....
- You should have gotten an MIT ID number in an email at some point during the summer.
- Setup MIT Kerberos username and password: this is going to be your email account and Athena (MIT's computer lab system) account. For instance, my Kerberos username is "lululi," which means that my email is lululi@mit.edu and that I use the username lululi to log into Athena cluster (both on a physical machine and remotely). You only get to choose your username once, and MIT does not allow aliasing names the last time I look up, so I'd recommend choose something sane.
- Setup MIT email forwarding (optional): https://ist-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/email/forward What happens is MIT uses Outlook Web which is something any sane human being would not want to deal with (plus it has a super small storage limit), so I'd recommend forward your mit emails into something else (a popular choice is gmail). It takes less than a minute to setup.
- Ship your items to MIT (optional): at least two self-storage services offers ship & store service, which means that you can ship boxes to their location, and they will hold them for you for up to a month till you arrive on campus and pick them up. The two I know of are:
- Metropolitan Moving & Storage (right on campus): http://www.metmove.com/freshmen-shipping
- UPS: http://www.theupsstore.com/pack-ship/Pages/index.aspx
These services could cost a couple hundred dollars though depend on how much stuff you've got, so the cheaper alternative would be finding out whether you can directly ship to your dorm, or ask a current graduate student politely whether you can ship to their apartment.