34-year-old making $400,000 at TikTok: Being let go from Meta in 2022 was 'perfect timing'

This story is part of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.

When Sora Lee was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, she got what she considers to be pretty bad career advice.

"'Pursue a major that you're passionate about,'" she says an advisor told her and her peers. "Good for her that her career worked out, but I don't think that was very helpful advice for someone like me who was an international student."

Lee began studying political science, which she was interested in, until she considered how it could affect her earnings and ability to get a job down the line. As an immigrant from South Korea, Lee was already thinking about her ability to stay and work in the States, which would require an employer-sponsored visa. 

In her mind, that would be difficult to attain without a job in a highly competitive field. She didn't think a bachelor's degree in political science alone would lead her there.

"I don't think it's mutually exclusive to pursue money or pursue passion, but I do think you can't not think about money because a lot of us need to support [a family] or don't have any family to support [us]," Lee tells CNBC Make It. 

She wound up double majoring in political science and economics to broaden her job prospects, and the decision seems to have paid off. 

Now 34, Lee lives in San Mateo, California, and earns a base salary of $320,000 a year as the global head of product marketing at TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance. This year, she'll receive $80,000 in restricted stock units, which brings her total compensation up to $400,000. 

She started at TikTok in 2023. That year, she received $48,000 in RSUs and a $50,000