By Megan Burbank / Crosscut.com
January 24, 2024
This spring, 80 doctors will graduate from Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine in Spokane, the medical school’s fourth class since it opened in 2017. Pierce Claassen, a fourth-year medical student, will be among them. Claassen has spent most of his life in Eastern Washington, growing up the son of a third-generation dryland wheat farmer in Clarkston, a small town of about 7,000 in Asotin County in the far southeast corner of the state.
“My family emigrated out here from Nebraska in the 1920s,” he said. “And we have been farming here ever since. And I’m the first to go into medicine.”
Claassen attended a public high school in Clarkston, then headed to WSU’s Pullman campus for his bachelor’s degree in microbiology and molecular biology. When it came time to apply to medical school, staying in Eastern Washington felt like a no-brainer.
During his time at WSU’s medical school, Claassen had the chance to return to his hometown as part of a WSU clinical rotation in family medicine at TriState Health. “I was working with the team of primary care providers, seeing patients all day long,” he said.