Word:
LyX (the graphical frontend to LaTeX):
For those who wish to write their theses in LyX, Dr. Mike Short provides this complete example as a template. Keep the organization of the document the same, edit "cover.tex" by hand, and otherwise replace the template content with your own. Then you will have a complete document, formatted per MIT's regulations.
LaTeX:
Or you can just write Latex code using any text editor. Lulu Li recommend taking advantage of the command \newcommand{command}{definition}. This allows you to save time on some commonly used definitions. See examples at here, or run:
> git clone https://github.com/lilulu/latex-style.git
In particular, the mitthesis.cls file (link here) is what Lulu used for MS thesis (link). You should not need to touch mitthesis.cls at all, and the master.tex is pretty self-explanatory.