Commencement Spotlight: Sean McBride

As a kid, I was always very curious. Initially I wanted to be a paleontologist or a biologist. And I always liked studying the world.

I just always wanted to get more fundamental and to find out how things worked. I remember as a kid wanting to figure out why the lights turned on when I used the light switch. That drove me to learn about chemistry, and then I learned about atoms and subatomic particles. Then I wanted to be a particle physicist to study even smaller things.

And it just kept getting more and more fundamental until I got to wanting to study the frontiers of theoretical physics.

UCSB is a very good physics school. My undergraduate advisor had done some research here, and I knew a few of the professors here. They have the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) here, which is the biggest center for theoretical physics in the world. Everyone who's anybody in theoretical physics comes through here.

I've met basically everyone in my field in the last six years because they've come through here. So the combination of good advisors, being around people who are very curious, getting to meet  anyone I want, and -- basically for free-- getting to go to conferences every year is pretty nice.

So my field is kind of interesting where, you know, I have an advisor and he's great and I work with him when there's something to work on...but it's a bit more freeform in my field. If you have an idea and you can convince people to work on it, then you just work with them. So I've worked with a different advisor in the past and I've tried to start collaboration with people at other universities -- and all of that is very strongly encouraged. UCSB is pretty great for that because a lot of the faculty here work on pretty much the same thing--so there's a lot of collaboration. There's a lot of, you know, just walking around and talking to people, all of whom are interested in the same thing. So that's what it's like. There are a lot of grad students, which was also nice. At one point we had 25 graduate students -- the lounge and journal clubs were bustling. I could talk to a lot of people, which is great. I never felt isolated here.

Not all of us have the same advisor but we we have a weekly journal club where someone can give an hour-long seminar to all of us. I made it a point that everyone has to bring food -- like you have to bake something if you're giving a talk! And that just made it. Once a week for an hour, everyone gets together and talks about physics. It keeps you from forgetting that people exist.

People always come around. You know, I have an office in the physics building and it doesn't have any windows. So I hang out in this common area and so do a lot of other people. When you hang out in the common area, sometimes you just go on three-hour long diatribes on physics. In some ways, that can help you to start new collaborations or start projects...or just gets you interested in things that you didn't know were going on in the field.

I've gone to conferences with a lot of my friends in Spain and Italy. Traveling is nice. These are multi-week conferences, so you just get to hang out. Collaboration is a big part of my field, and I think the environment at UCSB has been pretty good at fostering it.

The most significant conference was probably it was 2022-- it was my fourth year. There was a six-week-long conference in Florence. I didn't go for all six weeks -- I went for two weeks. But there was this one week where there was this training session for young graduate students and they had a lot of cool lectures. It was in this 500-year-old building on top of a hill. It was 100 degrees. Everyone was sweating. I had to take an hour-long bus from my Airbnb and then walk up a giant hill to get there. I never wanted to do that.

At the end of the day, we would all go out to get some dinner and some wine afterward. I made a lot of good friends there. I met a lot of people from MIT, Harvard and all these really big universities. They were all very impressive people and great to talk to. That's probably the most significant conference I went to.

My specific subfield is called high energy theoretical physics -- I think a better name for what I do is quantum gravity.

So we have two theories in physics: We have quantum mechanics, the theory of small things, and gravity, the theory of large things. And at a mathematical level, they don't agree. So part of my research is trying to understand what can make them agree and under what circumstances. Because basically, once you have that, you have what one might call a theory of everything, which is really what, you know, most of us in the field are looking for.  We're looking for the theory of everything that can explain all natural phenomenon. I've had a few research projects over the years basically exploring aspects of certain dualities and certain models that might help you understand aspects of quantum gravity.

I never had a well-defined research goal where it was like "I'm going to do this project at the end of my PhD, it will be done." If my project was to understand the theory of everything, obviously I have not accomplished that! I am a graduate student, and I probably won't come to that in my lifetime. You know, six years is a long time to be learning something. I think I have learned a lot here. I've accomplished my goal of feeling competent in my research and taking that into being in a postdoc later...you know, just trying to research this thing for the rest of my life, maybe.

So the goal of any theoretical physics is physicist is basically to become a professor, because it's kind of the only job where you can do theoretical physics. I have a postdoc lined up at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  I'm very excited about because everyone who hears I'm going to Vancouver says that they love Vancouver. I've never been. In my field, you know, you go to grad school, you do a postdoc, maybe two, maybe three, and then you get a faculty position.

In terms of career aspirations, I'm still on that track. It was a rough year. Funding is drying up. A lot of people I know didn't get jobs. So I'm happy I'm able to continue to pursue this. And being a professor seems really fun. I love teaching, teaching -- it's really fun to explain things in creative ways that help people understand. Physics is for everyone --but physics is confusing and so we try to draw analogies by using physical examples. That moment when the students in the room are like "yes, I understand!" and you can tell that... [smiles]  That moment we can connect with students on things and you can build that connection -- it's great. My first year here, I was able to teach an entire freshman physics major sequence. So I got to know these kids for an entire year -- that was a really fun experience. After a year, you build up a rapport with them. It gets less formal and you can really see them opening up and asking you questions. It's really nice when you let loose of the formalities of the classroom. People just are comfortable talking about physics because that's what we love do.