Robert McKinney, Ph.D.

Having an opportunity to work for the Department of Counselor Education was really exciting and appealing to me. I knew I wanted to work with a great group of professional educators who had teaching at the heart of what they were doing and I found that at Gonzaga. Also, I was previously working at another Jesuit university and I greatly appreciated the Jesuit principles incorporated into higher education. Gonzaga seemed like a very natural "fit" for me. One of my professional passions is multicultural counseling considerations. I hope within my teaching, service, and research here at Gonzaga that I can share this passion in various ways with the SOE. Already I am teaching Diversity in Counselling for students in Vancouver and I hope to only increase the amount of work I can do for the SOE related to this passion. When I was younger, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I was convinced I was going to live in Montana and use a tiny chisel and toothbrush to dig up dinosaur bones. The first Jurassic Park movie came out around this time and it only added fuel to my early professional desire. I shared this early dream with a colleague a few years ago and she told me that as a counselor I can help dig up, not dinosaur bones, but buried thoughts and feelings within others.