Check out this Instagram post of her.

But still, it's super-frustrating to think, what if we had extra people to snoop around like this — to be able to investigatively cover more stories, or to do more in politics?

Like on primary night: "That's our staff?

I think the older you get, the more you appreciate it. The pinnacle of her modeling career was in1980 when she won the Miss Colorado beauty pageant at the age of 19. Taste of Colorado, Labor Day weekend, we don't have that many people. Christiansen was hired as a writer, not an on-camera personality, and it took years of effort, and a willingness to battle for each step up the ladder, before she was finally allowed to become a regular on the anchor desk.

Who can I work with who's any better? All rights reserved.I spent, gosh, three and a half years or maybe even more behind the scenes. This stuff normally doesn't happen.Christiansen admits that the outlines of her story seem too perfect to be true.

If somebody had told me that story in college, I would have said, "No, you're crazy. I was surrounded by women who were in their mid-twenties, who were getting their MBAs or headed off to law school, going to medical school. I got them out for fun in the driveway five or ten years ago, when no one was around, and tried it [laughs].

Getting to speak off the cuff, doing some ad-libbing, getting to know a little bit about reporters, understanding the expectations of being on stage, if you will, and being a public figure in some respects. I twirled for the Denver Gold.

I'm the Colorado girl who's still here. We learned about shooters and how we use their names and the kind of images and video we use in the moments after something like that. I absolutely understand that. So I got promoted and was given benefits and had a full-time job for the next three years. That's a positive. And the other really critical part of it is that you can't be trapped into making a mistake when you're part of this, when you're part of a breaking-news situation. Kim orders a chardonnay, Keri a Grey Goose, up, with a twist.

But that's what I did, because that's what I wanted to do. So I was concerned about that.

Okay, you grew up in Arvada, you go to the University of Colorado, you study journalism, you work behind the scenes, you evolve into your dream job, and you're still there thirty-something years later.

She has been with 9 News for over three decades. And the photographers, the photojournalists, they're really the best journalists I've ever met. Kim Christiansen is an American journalist and news anchor.

Even though you wouldn't see me or hear me on the story.

Like, "This man is teaching me journalism, and if I don't earn an A in this class, that means I'm an epic failure."

I've worked with extraordinary people who've made me look so much smarter and more interesting. It's tough to do that. They will all remind you of me out there practicing, because that's what I did.

I look back at those women and see the emails that say, "So-and-so is now a district attorney in North Carolina, and someone else is now finishing up her medical degree." And she was the one who said, after two or three months, "I'm good with talking about it if you need to tell people." But back then, when I was younger, I really did practice every day, like a good hour or two a day.It's really a culture change and a mindset change.

My research has often been a integration of theoretical, computational and experimental studies of complex systems involving a rigorous mathematical approach to pioneer new ways of analysing such systems quantitatively. Then the station had to slowly change and evolve. And he was right. That isn't really what I did. Some of it did come back. And then I worked directly with Ed every night.

However, the exact figures of her annual salary and her net worth are not yet publicly available. So I have empathy and understanding for all the newbies who come into this business and a lot of the young writers and reporters and photographers who were once like me. If we have a wildfire, we don't have the staff to send three or four crews to different areas. I've learned more about journalism from the photojournalists in this building than from anybody else, and more than I could ever learn in a classroom.

But there's just as much of a focus on quality and the fact that everybody can be a journalist — how we do that, how we approach it, and how we can teach others. Kim right after her graduation worked as a writer and associate at 9 News.