Hoda Kotb told Fordham University graduates on May 16 that the road to a career can be longer, rougher and more humiliating than young people expect. Speaking to the Class of 2026, she said she was happy to be there, then quickly turned the room toward the setbacks that shaped her early television career.
“Do not worry, OK? When I graduated college, I did not have a job,” Kotb said. She said she had one interview after college, and that the first answer she got was no. In Richmond, Virginia, she said she was told, “Hoda, my God, you are so not ready for Richmond.”
That rejection, she told the audience, did not end the chase. Kotb said she drove three hours from Richmond to Roanoke after hearing that a news director there might hire her, only to be told, “Hoda, you are so not ready for Roanoke.” From there, she said, a news director in Roanoke sent her on again, telling her to drive to Memphis, Tennessee, because someone there might hire her.
The speech came during a spring graduation season that has put a long list of public figures in front of college audiences, including Harrison Ford, Henry Winkler, Tom Brady, Lindsey Vonn and Eric Church. Kotb’s address fit that moment but kept its focus on the grind behind the polished career: the interviews that went nowhere, the cross-state drives and the persistence it took to keep moving after each dismissal.
She said she shared nine life lessons during the address, but the core message was plain. The career many students imagine arriving in a single step may begin with one interview, 27 job rejections in 10 days, and a lot of time spent hearing that someone is not ready yet. Kotb’s own story was less about instant success than about refusing to treat rejection as a final verdict.
She closed by playing Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York,” a choice that gave the speech a little lift after a long run of setbacks. By then, the point had been made clearly: the answer to the title question is that Kotb said the first job did not come quickly, but she kept going until the route finally opened.
