Kotb says 27 rejections in 10 days led to Fordham speech
Hoda Kotb told Fordham University graduates on Saturday, May 16, that kotb hit 27 job rejections in 10 days after finishing a broadcast journalism degree from Virginia Tech in 1986. The speech turned a familiar career-memory into a concrete lesson for a graduating class entering a market that still rewards persistence as much as polish.
Virginia Tech to Richmond
Kotb said she borrowed her mother’s car and drove to a nearby TV station in Richmond, Virginia, looking for work. A news director there told her she was too "green and inexperienced," and she said the same pattern followed in Dothan, Alabama, and across the whole southeastern United States.
"Does anyone know where Dothan, Alabama, is? OK, good for you. I got rejected in Dothan, too, and then throughout the whole southeastern United States, OK?" she told the audience. The scale was blunt: "At the end of it, 27 rejections, 10 days, and my mom needed her car back, so I started driving home depressed."
Stan Sandroni in Greenville
On the drive back, Kotb stopped at a CBS affiliate in Greenville, Mississippi, where Stan Sandroni gave her a chance and watched her resume tape. "I like what I see," he told her, and that line became the hinge in a search that had already stretched across multiple states.
Kotb later distilled the lesson for the graduates: "You don’t need everyone to love you, you just need one. Find your Stan, find the one person who believes in you," she said. For a class hearing a polished commencement speech, the message was practical: the first break can come from one gatekeeper, not a chorus of them.
Greenville’s $12,000 Start
The Greenville job paid $12,000 a year, according to a 2018 profile piece, and Kotb has pointed to that level before. In a 2009 commencement speech at West Virginia University, she said, "I made more money working at Ponderosa than I did at my first job," adding, "I couldn’t pay my bills," "I had to juggle which bills I paid," and "But I was in love."
That combination of low pay and leverage is the friction in Kotb’s story: the first opening was real, but it was not glamorous. She pushed graduates to treat that mismatch as part of the path, telling them, "Figure out what you love and find a way to get paid for it," and "Your trip’s not someone else’s trip. Don’t worry about who’s next to you."
Kotb’s advice lands best as a working rule, not a slogan: keep moving, keep asking, and do not assume the first round of rejection is the final verdict. Her story at Fordham put a number on that principle — 27 rejections, 10 days — and then showed the one stop that changed the route.
