Hours before Hoda Kotb took to the Center for the Arts mainstage as the final speaker in UB’s 2025-26 Distinguished Speakers series, she co-anchored an episode of NBC’s “Today” show in New York City.
Kotb, a veteran journalist, is certainly used to a busy life. Throughout her 26-year career at NBC, Kotb joined as a “Dateline” correspondent in 1998 and secured the co-anchor spot on the “Today” show in 2018. After leaving the show last January, Kotb launched a wellness app named “Joy 101” and released a memoir on how she herself found joy while withstanding life’s unexpected events.
All of these experiences is what Kotb brought to UB Tuesday night — personal and professional stories about resilience, joy and determination, throughout her career and open battle with breast cancer — in the form of five lessons she learned.
But before those stories, Kotb brought attention to the yellow ribbons throughout the audience that symbolized support for Savannah Guthrie, Kotb’s long-time friend and current co-anchor for the “Today” show, whose mother had been abducted from her home Feb. 1. Kotb had temporarily reassumed co-anchor on the “Today” show on behalf of Guthrie.
“Savannah, my dear friend and colleague, has been going through a lot, and the only thing she requests of me daily, and I pass along to everyone too, is prayers,” Kotb said. “So keep them coming because that’s where we live. We live in the lane of hope.”
Kotb’s first lesson came after 27 rejections and 10 days of driving in her mom’s car and auditioning at news stations through Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.
The last try was at a small CBS station in Greenville, Mississippi, where Stan Sandroni looked at Kotb’s tape for a nerve-wracking 30 minutes, said, “I like what I see” and hired her on the spot.
“I was sobbing like a baby,” Kotb said. “The first lesson of life is you only need one person to like you.”
The next life lesson hit a few years into Kotb’s dream job as a correspondent for “Dateline” — an NBC broadcast news magazine centered around crime and investigative journalism. And with just getting married, her life was going “really good.”
That was when a phone call told Kotb that she had breast cancer.
“Lesson number two is, life changes when you least expect it,” Kotb said.
After a long period of recovering at home with “Law and Order,” Kotb was slowly getting back into work, having just gone to Ireland for a quick, fun story.
By the time Kotb got on the airplane ride back, she was journaling and crying.
The third lesson came in the form of Kotb’s chatty seatmate, Ken Duane, where “a stranger can change the course of your life.”
When Kotb opened up about her breast cancer diagnosis to Duane throughout a round of back-to-back questions, she had prefaced it with “Listen, I have breast cancer but I hope when you get off this plane, you don’t say ‘Oh, I sat next to this girl with breast cancer.’ I hope there are other things you think of before that.”
Duane responded with, “What is wrong with you?”
What came after that was Kotb’s fourth lesson: “Don’t hog your journey. It’s not just for you. You can put your stuff deep into your pockets and you can take it to your grave, or you can help somebody.”
Breast cancer taught Kotb that life was in the margins, where it’s to be “valued and not wasted.”
Kotb never asked for a promotion or a raise before, thinking that she would be noticed eventually. But it didn’t work.
Four short words that shaped Kotb’s fifth lesson came to her in the middle of recovery: “You can’t scare me.”
“All of a sudden I felt unafraid of things that used to frighten me,” Kotb said.
That’s how Kotb walked up to the head of NBC and asked for the job that would define her career — co-anchor of the “Today” show.
Nadia Bangaroo is the assistant news editor and can be reached at nadia.bangaroo@ubspectrum.com.
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Paul Hokanson / UB Athletics
