By Kim Kalunian, WPRO News
In 1997, Anaridis Rodriguez has just immigrated to Providence. She was 12 years old. And she didn’t speak of word of English.
Fast forward to 2015, and Rodriguez, now 30, is the news anchor for The Weather Channel’s flagship news show, “America’s Morning Headquarters” or “AMHQ.”
But all that was a far way off when Rodriguez immigrated to Rhode Island from the Dominican Republic with her family. As a young girl in the DR she spent some time trying to learn English, listening to Michael Jackson music at her grandmother’s neighbor’s house and trying to learn the words. Once in Providence, she was surrounded by English-speaking peers and teachers who said her name in a way she had never heard it before. She was quickly put into English as a second language courses at the Robert F Kennedy Elementary School.
Once in her teens, she was accepted to Classical High School. Her sophomore year, they held auditions for the school’s closed circuit TV news station. She told them she wanted to be involved in some way and that she liked baseball and sports. They brought her on board as a sports reporter.
“We had this little studio above the gym, and it would broadcast it in a closed circuit to all the home rooms across the high school,” she said, recalling her first assignment: covering renovations at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket.
“I think that’s when I had the ‘aha moment’ — I’m getting a front row seat to anything that’s happening,” she said. “I enjoyed that perspective and that vantage point.”
Rodriguez quickly decided that she wanted to pursue broadcast journalism as a career, and by her senior year at Classical, she was the executive producer and anchor of the school’s news show. After graduating, she studied communications at Rhode Island College. But the recession had come, and upon graduating, Rodriguez found herself without a job.
“I did what millions of students did, which is go back to school,” she said.
She enrolled in Emerson College in Boston, where she earned her master’s in broadcast journalism. Today, she credits the school with helping to kick start her career.
“Both jobs that I’ve had, I didn’t apply for,” she said.
After graduating from Emerson, Rodriguez was hired as a news anchor and reporter at WWLP, an NBC affiliate in Springfield, Massachusetts.
“Someone saw me on a tape and said, ‘I like that girl,’” she said. “And I had a job.”
It was a similar situation with The Weather Channel, who also offered her a job after seeing her on screen.
“All of a sudden I’m getting a call from Sam Champion asking me to be on his show,” she said, referring to the anchor and managing editor at The Weather Channel. She joined TWC in February of 2014 as the anchor for their morning news show, AMHQ.
Although her ascent to being a cable news fixture may sound glamorous and Hollywood-esque, Rodriguez said her day-to-day job is demanding, and requires her to skimp on beauty sleep – she wakes up every day at 3 a.m., and is in studio for hair and makeup by 4. At 5, there’s a news meeting, and AMHQ goes live on air at 7 a.m.
Rodriguez has been on the fast-track to success since arriving in America as a pre-teen, but she said it wasn’t all luck.
“Preparation is so important,” she said, paraphrasing the Seneca quote, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
She said she worked hard to make sure that when she was given an opportunity, she was prepared to step up to the plate and seize it. From learning English, to working in her high school newsroom to networking at college, Rodriguez said she’s “done everything” to get to where she is today.
“I just think preparing yourself and being open to learning all the time is very important in anything that you do,” she said.
