Colin McCluney is completing a month-long study program at Orcas Medical Center as part of the Rural/Underserved Opportunities Program, with the UW School of Medicine.

The program is a four-week immersion experience in community medicine for students between their first and second years of medical school. Students live in rural or urban underserved communities throughout Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. They work side-by-side with local physicians providing health care to underserved populations.

McCluney is president of the American Medical Student Association, UW School of Medicine chapter, and he is a member of the Physicians for a National Health Program. For six weeks in 2007, he participated in a Child Family Health International Service-Learning program in Dehra Dun, India.

McCluney grew up in Massachusetts. During his second year of high school, he become a fully certified EMT and, for the next two years, served as an active EMT while completing high school. An accomplished pianist and guitarist, McCluney graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with a BA in music.

Upon graduation, he returned to Massachusetts and worked in the classical music department of a Boston record store. When he returned to the Northwest, he worked in the travel business and became an EMT in King County, before enrolling in the UW School of Medicine.