They Want to Be Doctors. Student Loan Caps Are Complicating Their Dreams.

Detailed summary

This year, the first class of medical students will begin their journey to becoming physicians under new rules limiting how much they can borrow for school.

Bryan Torres didn’t meet many doctors growing up. It wasn’t until he was 15, when his mother was hospitalized with respiratory failure, that he realized he wanted to be a physician.

Mr. Torres, who grew up in Maryvale, Ariz., and is of Mexican and Colombian descent, would translate between his mother and her doctors. They didn’t speak enough Spanish “to comfort my mom,” he recalled, and “didn’t look like me.”

Though Mr. Torres, now 33, said his mother received quality care, he felt “alienated, hopeless and helpless” while in the hospital with her.

“That’s kinda when I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to making sure that no one has to ever feel the way I felt in that moment,” he said.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in biosystems engineering from the University of Arizona, he spent six years taking the medical school admissions exam five times, earning a master’s degree and working across the health field as a pharmacy technician, a medical assistant, an E.R. scribe, a molecular biologist and more.

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