Hoda Kotb has been a fixture on network television for decades. But the Today host, who announced Thursday that she would leave the anchor desk early next year, has rarely appeared on the air.

In a 2016 appearance on SiriusXM’s Today show, Kotb said that as a recent college graduate, she thought she would only need one job interview to land her first TV job.

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

When Kotb walked into the station, she immediately felt at home. She looked around the station and “planned my whole life” in Richmond, convinced she would get the job.

“The news director took my tape, put it in the machine and played it for a few minutes and stopped it,” she said. “He said, ‘Oh, Hoda, you’re not ready for Richmond. I don’t know why anybody sent you here. You’re too green. You’re no good.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.'”

When she left, the news director told her that a friend of his was hiring for a position three hours away in Roanoke, Virginia, but she had to be there that same day before he left on his trip.

Kotb drove over and met with the other news director, but he watched her video for no more than “30 seconds” before pulling it out and telling her she wasn’t ready to go on the radio yet.

“I thought, ‘Who isn’t ready for Roanoke? Everyone should be able to get a job here!’” Kotb said.

But before she left, her interviewer told her that he knew of a radio station in Memphis that was hiring and that he had recommended she go there.

“I drove all night all the way across (Tennessee),” she said. “This guy met me, he got the tape, he put it in, he said, ‘You’re not ready for Memphis yet.'”

The trip that Kotb thought would only take an afternoon soon took longer.

“I drove around in that car for 10 days,” she said. “I was rejected everywhere. Everywhere you can think of in the Southeast, I was rejected.”

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

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

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

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

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

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