She worked as a janitor at a Yale hospital, earning $14 an hour. Now she's a doctor there — but took on $590K in student debt to get there

The 32-year-old recently began an anesthesiology residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, the same place where she was born and later spent nearly a decade as a janitor, cleaning patient rooms for $14 an hour.

At the time, becoming a doctor wasn’t yet the goal. Instead, Taylor-Allen was drawn to the hospital job for the stability it seemed to offer.

“I just remember people telling me that you could retire there,” she told CNBC Make It. “This is a job you can have for a long time. They have good benefits.”

A leap of faith

As she was working as a janitor at the hospital at 18, she was unsure about attending college and viewed healthcare as a field with dependable pay and benefits. The job was personal for Taylor-Allen, too. Her mother was being treated at the hospital after suffering serious injuries in a house fire, but she felt the medical staff were not taking her condition seriously enough.

She wrote directly to the hospital’s CEO — whose trash she emptied as part of her job — and said his involvement helped her mother get the correct diagnosis.

That experience inspired her to become a doctor.

“Let me become that doctor that I felt like should have helped my mom,” she recalls thinking. “Let me be in that position to help more people who look like my mother.”

For the class of 2026, the median four-year cost of attendance is nearly $298,000 at a public medical school and more than $408,000 at a private one, according to the AAMC. That does not include any debt students may already have from college or graduate school.

Taylor-Allen now earns about $88,000 a year as a resident. Combined with her husband’s Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, the couple brings in roughly $150,000 a year.

A costly degree

Taylor-Allen relied heavily on student loans throughout her education. After tuition was paid, she said she received roughly $30,000 a year in loan refunds to cover rent, groceries and other living expenses, forcing her to stretch borrowed money across the school year.

She and her husband hope things will get a little easier now that they have settled in New Haven. Their new apartment in Connecticut is larger than the one they rented in Washington, D.C., but costs $2,900 a month compared with more than $3,500 before.

Taylor-Allen expects to earn between $350,000 and $700,000 a year once she finishes residency and begins working as an anesthesiologist. That future salary could make her debt more manageable, but a nearly $600,000 balance is still a difficult number to ignore.

And what she does with that debt now could matter. Taylor-Allen has said she plans to defer her federal student loans throughout her four-year residency.

George Dimov, a certified public accountant and founder of Dimov Partners, told Moneywise that deferring could be costly if Taylor-Allen’s loans and employer qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Under PSLF, borrowers can have their remaining federal student debt forgiven after making 120 qualifying monthly payments while working for an eligible employer. Federal repayment rules changed in July, including the introduction of a new income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan that can count toward PSLF.

“The first thing I’d check isn’t her budget,” he told Moneywise. “It’s whether her residency employer actually qualifies, because that one answer changes the entire repayment strategy.”

The decision could also affect how quickly Taylor-Allen and her husband can rebuild the savings they depleted during their move, begin investing again and eventually start a family.

Before taking on six figures of debt

The cost of Taylor-Allen’s education has stretched well beyond her student loan balance. Her husband sold nearly all of his investments, mostly cryptocurrency, to help the couple through their move.

For anyone considering medical school or another professional degree, it is worth looking at the full cost before borrowing. That includes tuition and interest, but also rent, living expenses, years spent earning a lower training salary and other financial goals that may have to wait.