As a freshman BME interested in graduate school and academia, where do I begin?
When you're a new undergraduate, you can't make real statements about what you want to study. It's simply too soon. Saying you want to work in [field] doesn't carry much weight if you have no idea what working in [field] is actually like.

At this point, don't worry too much about what kind of research you're doing. Just do something, anything, and figure out what you like. If you end up doing research in many different fields before deciding on something, that's fine - most other people do the same.