Applying to two departments at the same university (Maths)

[ScharlachRot]

Hi everybody, I had a question I'd really appreciate if someone could help me with: what do you people think of applying to two PhD departments at the same university? I'm a foreigner with a Msc in Maths living outside the US and I haven't found many people who could help me with this. Let me explain myself: I'll be applying to fairly competitive programs (top 20) in Mathematics and if I don't get to any of those I'd rather get into a different program (in Economics or Financial Engineering, since I hold a second undergrad degree in Economics -not a double major, that's not how it works here-) than do Maths at a lower-ranked university. Yes, those are my preferences and the point is not to argue about them, but to know whether it's advisable to apply to two programs at the same university... My fear is that the admissions people from the Maths department will have this information and deem that my commitment to do Maths is not that strong.

Any clues?

 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

You should be able apply to multiple programs at the same university, but this is not typically done for PhD programs (it is more common if you're applying to professional Masters programs, e.g. applying to MSW and MPP at the same school). But as you have mentioned, this may not look good to the Math department admissions committees. These adcoms really want people who only want to do math (especially if it's pure math), so I suspect that you are right that they won't receive this warmly.

 

What kind of math are you interested in? You could apply to programs that have applied math faculty, some of whom work in financial mathematics. The department where I got my MSc did not have a separate applied math department (applied and pure were both in the same department), and some of the faculty studied financial math.