Apatheix

Being supportive of taking courses is very different from trying to help a 3rd year PhD student leave the program to go elsewhere. I think his reaction would be very different if you told him your plan is to take courses and apply elsewhere in a few years. All I ment in my original post is that it's one thing to lose interest along the way and change your discipline but it's another thing to receive funding for years from one department just to build a better profile for the next application. I don't think any faculty member in any discipline would support the latter. The joint PhD idea seems like a very good option that doesn't burn any bridges.

Since no one else has mentioned this yet, do be careful with how you play this out. It might rub people the wrong way if you stay on at the history PhD for 2-3 years and receive funding just to take courses at another department and eventually leave. You will probably need a reference from someone at your current program, so do try to communicate your plans and preferably get their approval before you do anything.

There seem to be a second round of acceptances for yale on gradcafe. Can anyone confirm this?

For those of you accepted to yale, did you receive a phone call from a faculty member the next day? I missed a call from new haven and was wondering if anyone else experienced the same.

It sounds like your course is attempting to cover the first 3 chapters of big rudin or atleast a watered down version of it. I'd be surprised if you could follow such a class without knowing any prior analysis or some basic point set topology.

I dont think many people here know much in general about how the indian education system works so the advice you get here should be taken with a grain of salt. That being said , I would suggest that you talk to your profs and see where past students have gone and based of that ask them where they think you should be applying. I dont know about the madras school but if its Top 5 in india as you say , I imagine that students from there have made it into decent schools into the u.s in the past. It might not hurt to try and find some of them , perhaps by google or a linkedin search.

I can only answer Q2 in your post. I think I'm actually at your current university although I graduated honours math and did only micro/metrics as electives. (stayed for a math masters now) I did alot of graduate pure math courses and should warn you that they are significantly harder than the undergrad ones. The cohort you are taking classes with is also extremely smart. I wouldn't do them if I were you , the risk of doing bad outweighs the reward by a large margin and would ruin all progress you've made in the last year.

If I didn't take this , then it would be a course on analytic number theory with the focus being on L functions and modular forms. I apologize if this all sounds unfamiliar. I'm primarily interested in getting into theory , hence the focus on courses like these.

Do Adcoms want to know details about the courses that you are taking in the fall? I know it shows on the transcript but I guess what I'm wondering is if they want specific details like textbook being used and course content. I'll be taking several advanced math classes and I'm not sure if adcoms will necessarily know the content in them. I also wanted to check if you guys think the following course is useful . It's a functional analysis class with the topics being : Fredholm Theory , Spectral Theorem for compact/bounded self -adjoint operators. Lorentz spaces and interpolation, Banach algebras and the Gelfand theory, distributions and Sobolev spaces, The von Neumann-Schatten classes, symbolic calculus of Hilbert space operators, Representation theory and Harmonic Analysis, semigroups of operators, Krein-Milman theorem, tensor products of Hilbert spaces and Banach spaces, fixed point theorems. Incase it helps , I've already done several classes in analysis ( up to measure theory and fourier analysis ) and this course assumes pre req knowledge of all that so it is quite advanced. Do you think it's a wise idea to take this course in the fall term and let it show up as In-progress ?