There are full-circle moments, and then there is what Shay Taylor-Allen experienced in March. Upon completing her studies at the Howard University College of Medicine, the 32-year-old matched with a residency programme at Yale New Haven Hospital, the medical centre where she was born and later spent ten years working as a janitor. Securing this placement stands as a compelling Yale medical residency inspiration, illustrating how resilience can overcome structural barriers, high medical school student loan debt, and systemic bias.
The full-circle moment has felt nothing short of “surreal,” Taylor-Allen tells CNBC Make It — especially the moment when she received her new employee ID that says “doctor.” She still has the one she wore when she cleaned the rooms.
“I was in these same hallways on break, studying as much as I [could], getting ready for exams, stressing out that I might not even make it to medical school,” she says. “I’m coming back as a different person.”
Overcoming Medical School Student Loan Debt and Financial Strain
Getting to this point has put Taylor-Allen in a financial hole. Between her undergrad, master’s and medical degrees, Taylor-Allen says she racked up more than $300,000 in debt. She was borrowing around $30,000 per year. She met her husband, Rob, in April 2023 and the two married in July 2024. A retired veteran, he earns about $7,500 a month in retirement benefits, while Taylor-Allen earns $75,000 as a resident physician.
The financial struggle will have been worth getting Taylor-Allen to this new chapter, one in which she plans to grow into her new career, repay her debts and begin saving for her family’s future. Her salary will jump to at least $150,000 per year now.
Along with her husband, “our future plan is to invest back into us as much as possible,” Taylor-Allen says.
Taylor-Allen began working as a janitor at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2011 at age 18. She was unsure about college, and saw healthcare as a field that offered stability, she says.
“I just remember people telling me that you could retire there. This is a job you can have for a long time,” she says. “They have good benefits.” The gig paid $14 an hour.
Addressing Healthcare Disparities for Women of Color
As a janitor, she worked at the hospital where her mother actively received treatment, following a fire that broke out in her family home in 2010. The third-degree burns in her mother’s lungs created damage that necessitated years of care. Yet each time her mother saw doctors in the subsequent years, Taylor-Allen says she noticed the doctors treating her symptoms with skepticism.
Taylor-Allen began researching healthcare disparities women of colour experience, aiming to understand why some patients, particularly Black women, are likelier to be disbelieved by medical professionals when describing symptoms. She wrote to the hospital’s CEO, whose trash she took out, about what her mother was going through — and the CEO pushed the doctors to diagnose her mother more accurately, she says.
While working at the hospital, Taylor-Allen begun studying at Southern Connecticut University, still having “no clue” what she wanted to do. Her mother’s ordeal, and the research it prompted, made the path forward clear: “Let me become that doctor that I felt like should have helped my mom,” she remembers thinking. “Let me be in that position to help more people who look like my mother.”
Taylor-Allen switched her major to biology, from general studies. In 2018, she enrolled in a master’s programme in biomedical sciences at Quinnipiac University to bolster her medical school resume, and by 2021, she’d started at Howard.
From Yale New Haven Hospital Janitor to Doctor: Managing the Transition
For her first few years of med school, Taylor-Allen lived entirely on student loan money, she says: a $30,000-per-year reimbursement for her tuition payments, paid in two installments, which made budgeting tricky. “Basically, what I would do is: plan to pay my rent when I got the $15,000, and then use the rest for any utilities or groceries that I needed for that six months, and do the same for the rest of the year,” she says.
When Taylor-Allen met and married her husband, the two approached their financial life as a true partnership. When they met, Rob was working as a recruiter at insurance firm The Hartford and receiving benefits from his 12 years of military service. That income buoyed the couple while Taylor-Allen pursued her dreams, she says. He currently attends the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies and is pursuing a degree in AI management.
“He came into my life and he just helped so much. So I didn’t have to worry too much about any of the bills or anything like that. And he paid for the rent, the utilities — anything basically that we needed,” Taylor-Allen said.
In April, the couple needed quite a lot. After Taylor-Allen got her Yale New Haven Hospital match, the two needed to pay for life in Washington, D.C. while shuttling back and forth to Connecticut to find a new home there.
Taylor-Allen hopes that their expenses will normalize now that she and her husband have settled in New Haven, she says. Housing is cheaper: The couple paid more than $3,500 a month for a 600-square-foot apartment in Washington, D.C. Their 1,200-square-foot apartment in Connecticut costs them $2,900 a month.
Food costs should decrease, too. The pair dined out more than usual during their month of separation and travel, to the tune of $2,200. Some of that comes down to life in med school, Taylor-Allen says: “We eat out a lot because we’re just so busy.”
