Hoda Kotb spent 10 days driving around the country to get her first TV job: ‘I got rejected everywhere’

Hoda Kotb has been a fixture on network television for decades. But the Today host, who on Thursday announced that she would be leaving the anchor desk early next year, almost never made it on-air at all.

In a 2016 appearance on the Today show on SiriusXM, Kotb said that as a brand new college grad she thought she’d only need a single interview to land her first TV gig.

“I said ‘Mom, can I borrow the car? I need to drive to Richmond, get the job and come back,'” she said. “I got a new green suit. My hair was all blown out. I was ready. I had my resume tape and I drove to the station.”

Walking into the station, Kotb felt right at home. She looked around the station and “planned my whole life” in Richmond, certain she’d get the job.

“The news director took my tape, he put it in the machine and played it for a couple of minutes and he stopped it,” she said. “He said ‘Oh, Hoda, you’re not ready for Richmond. I don’t know why someone sent you here. You’re too green. You’re not good.’ And I was like ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.'”

As she was leaving, the news director told her that a friend of his was hiring for a role three hours away in Roanoke, Virginia, but she’d need to get there that same day before he left for a trip.

Kotb made the drive and met the other news director, but he didn’t watch her tape for more than “30 seconds” before popping it out and informing her that she wasn’t ready to be on-air.

“I was like, ‘Who’s not ready for Roanoke? Anybody should be able to get a job here!'” Kotb said.

But before sending her on her way, her interviewer said he knew of a station in Memphis that was hiring and suggested she bring her tape there.

“I drove all the way across [Tennessee] all night,” she said. “The guy met me, he took the tape, he put it in, he said ‘You are so not ready for Memphis.'”

The trip that Kotb thought would just take an afternoon soon stretched on and on.

“I was in that car driving around for 10 days,” she said. “I got rejected everywhere. Anywhere you can think of in the southeast, I got rejected.”

After a week and a half, Kotb said, her mom needed the car back. But on her way back home, she got lost in Mississippi and passed a sign for a CBS station.

“I said ‘I’m going to go there and get rejected,'” she said.

But the news director at the station watched her entire tape and hired her on the spot, she said.

The job was her foot in the door, and kickstarted a career that would take her to Florida, Illinois and eventually New Orleans before she joined Dateline NBC in 1998. By 2007, she was hired at Today.

“You just need one person to love you,” she said. “You don’t need everybody. Sometimes you think you need every single person to think you’re good. You don’t. You need one.”

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