Hoda Kotb Had Other Career Plans Before Finding Journalism

Hoda Kotb has been a fixture on our television sets for years, but if her childhood dreams had come true, she would have followed a very different career path. 

It’s hard to imagine the Today show without Kotb, where she has been a co-host and co-anchor since 2008, frequently alongside Jenna Bush Hager. However, in a recent interview with People, Kotb admitted that her path to journalism was a "very unlikely" one and that she is still a bit “shocked” to be in the anchor chair. It’s not just that she didn’t expect to get one of the prime spots on television, it’s that she actually wanted to be something else entirely: A teacher. 

As a youngster, Kotb had visions of herself in the classroom however as she got older she realized that the teaching part wasn’t actually what attracted her to the job. "I said I always wanted to be a teacher,” Kotb told People. “but as I broke that down as I got older, I realized that I'd been saying that most of my life because I always wanted children. It was kind of the closest to that."

Kotb, of course, didn’t end up as a teacher, but she is now a mother to two little girls, Hope, 4, and Haley, 7, with her ex Joel Schiffman. Kotb didn’t take a direct path to journalism and she didn’t take a straight line to motherhood, either. The beloved television personality welcomed her first child at 52 and her second at 54 via adoption.