This may be an unusual question: I have soft question on how to finalize my course plan in my senior year. Here's a brief background:
I am an Economics and a Mathematics major who has been taking a number of physics courses, and I wish to attend graduate school in physics with a theoretical/mathematical concentration. I am currently enrolled in 4 physics courses, along with an additional non-physics course. One of these courses is a graduate course in electrodynamics, covering potential theory, magnetostatics and EM waves. If I keep all these 4 courses, I'll graduate with 13 physics courses. After taking a year off, I'd like to apply to a theoretical physics program.
I'm thinking of the dropping the electrodynamics course and going with the 4 courses: the non-physics one and general relativity, quantum optics and quantum information. I'm also informally studying some pure math with an instructor, which I continue to do over the next 1.5 years, as I eventually wish to specialize in a theoretical concentration. For instance, I intend to study Lebesgue integrals, Analysis of several variables by the end of the term, prior to starting the study of manifolds hopefully in the summer.
My concerns are:
Given I am studying material for which I am not getting any credit (self-studying), should I consider dropping the course on electromagnetism. For one, will it hurt my chances since I'm not a physics major and I'll only have 12 courses. The reason I wish to drop the course is because I'd rather first study ordinary and partial differential equations outside of class (can't take a course) and then study E&M properly.
The reason I'm asking this question because as you can see due to unfortunate circumstances, I am emphasizing self-studying material outside of the class the way I wish to study it, and which sadly isn't done in most classrooms. Case in point, studying pure math with the math instructor. But I'll hopefully get a letter from her to take that into account.
Given my slightly weird preferences (I suppose), should I consider dropping the course based on the aforementioned concerns. I'm not sure if this decision can come back and haunt me. Or to put this in another way: should I be focusing more on studying material outside of the class in my last semester, or is that a futile exercise that won't help me much -- ergo, I should sit tight and take the physics course.
I hope the question isn't out of context. I placed this question on this forum as well because as you can see, I'm self-studying a lot of math apparently! Any and all advice would be appreciated.
P.S: I chose not to enroll in independent studies based on the material I'm covering outside of class is because the pure math instructor, with whom I am studying, said as long as credits aren't an issue, then there's no need to enroll in such independent studies. I presume she said that because I told her I'll be interested in getting a letter from her anyway. So I have decided not to enroll in an independent study and hope her recommendation letter, rather simply a Pass or Fail grade for the Independent study listed in the transcript, will do the trick