34-year-old quit her 6-figure tech job to go to pastry school in France: 'What would I want to be doing that would bring me joy?'

Valerie Valcourt is living what some might consider the dream life: The 34-year-old former executive assistant quit her tech job over a year ago and now makes pastries in the South of France.

She recently went viral on TikTok for posting her experience of changing careers in her 30s: "Don't let society try to trick you into thinking that it's too late to start over or that you have to choose one set path," she says in the video.

Valcourt lives by that mentality: Back in 2020, Valcourt was working her Big Tech corporate job in Seattle earning just over $100,000 after bonuses and equity but feeling "at a really low place" and wondering: "What would I want to be doing that would bring me joy?"

She'd always wanted to go to culinary school abroad and, after some online research, submitted her application to a French school on a whim. She got accepted in October 2020 and resigned from her day job soon after. But, she now admits, she wasn't ready to make such a big life change.

"I ended up kind of falling on my face," Valcourt tells CNBC Make It. "I didn't have enough saved, and I didn't realize the mental toll it would take to quit my job at the time." So, she put culinary school on the backburner and rejoined the corporate world to sort things out.

Valcourt realized she would need to double her savings to roughly $20,000 to live off of while in school. To accelerate her savings, she took on a new executive assistant job and moved from Seattle to New York and finally to Connecticut to live with her family.

By the spring of 2022, she was feeling renewed.

She spent more time researching schools that would help her learn French as well as cooking techniques through an internship placement. She landed on a school in the south of France