Guide to MS Applications

I was fortunate to get MS acceptance from Cornell, NYU, Columbia, UPenn, USC, Purdue etc but never from my dream universities (MIT, Stanford, or Harvard). I choose to believe it was my GRE and Toefl scores, but guess I will never be able to figure out why. But fortunately, I have a cool brother named Rishu (re-issue of Ishu? definitely not, we are poles apart) who is a graduate student at Stanford University doing his Master's in the ICME department. Given he cracked one of the most prestigious universities, please find his expert opinion on how to go about MS applications!