Do i need special pants or are jeans enough?
Also, how many warm weather clothes should i bring? Should I bring mainly winter clothing?
Where are you from? Our family is from near Cornell and I’m an adjunct at a nearby college so I see how differently we see the weather compared to someone from, say, the Bahamas. My kids won’t take any real winter gear back to Cornell until Thanksgiving break, and will get by fine with jeans and a warm coat all winter. (In fact, if you see a tall guy on campus in shorts in January, it’s probably my son, who seems to have gotten more of our Viking blood than my other kids.) However, at the college where I teach I’ve had students from very warm climates who seem extraordinarily cold with the first frost hits in late September or October.
Get a coat and several thinner long sleeve shirts to layer under it for the coldest months. You’ll also need summer clothing for late August and September when it can be pretty warm, remembering that most of the dorms have no air conditioning. Jeans are enough unless you want to do winter sports, like skiing. If you really suffer from the cold, a thin set of long underwear under the jeans can be extra warm, or flannel-lined jeans. But we never use these ourselves, unless we’re going to a football game on a very cold and windy day. Make sure you have a hat and gloves. Boots might be good, but YMMV; DD wears boots all the time, DS only wears them for sledding. A scarf to wrap around your face if it gets frigid like last winter (-20 F a couple of mornings here!). I like my coat to have a hood to keep the wind off my neck, but again, YMMV.
Great, thanks
You’re only walking a few hundred yards from heated bldg to heated bldg, not leading a dogsled expedition to the south pole.
Freshman engineers have a 20 min or so walk, if they don’t want to take a bus. But yes, generally we would only break out our warmest clothes if we were going stand around outside for a significant time, like at a football game. Yet those days when the temp didn’t get much above 0° F were a pretty cold walk between buildings, according to my upstate born and bred daughter. The last two winters around here were unusually cold so we may be due for a break this year 
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@GMTplus7 i’ll be walking 2 miles each day round trip just to get to class, so yeah lol i want warm clothes
You should get rain gears and water proof clothing because it rains and snows a lot in Ithaca due to the lake effect. Get a rain coat with a hood, and a good down coat.