Editor's note: Beginning Friday, "American Idol" finalist and Utahn Carmen Rasmusen will write a weekly column about this season's show.

Five years after she was a top-six finalist, Carmen Rasmusen still gets excited about "American Idol."

"To this day, when I hear that (theme) music, my tummy does a flip-flop," Rasmusen said.

And she hopes to share her excitement in a weekly column about the current season of "American Idol" a feature that debuts in today's Deseret Morning News.

"I'm so excited about it!" Rasmusen said.

Like all "Idol" contestants, she was a complete unknown when she became part of the TV phenomenon in early 2003. Unlike all the other contestants, she was a 17-year-old high school senior from Bountiful.

"My life completely changed and will never be the same again," Rasmusen said. "I feel, more than anything, I've grown up a lot. I'm really happy for the experience that it gave me and for the knowledge that it gave me."

Knowledge about the music business, that is. Both the good and the bad.

"It is wonderful and it is magical, but it's also really dirty and really tough," Rasmusen said. "And for a teenager — a 17-year-old — going into that, all of a sudden there's drugs and alcohol and pornography and the temptation to wear next-to-nothing on stage. Growing up in Bountiful, Utah, it was two different worlds completely."

Rasmusen admitted, "I thought I was totally ready for it, but I wasn't. I was just a baby. Looking back, I don't think I would have been as strong and as grounded if I hadn't had standards and the values ingrained in me as a little girl growing up to withstand the temptations."

Her father tried to warn her things would be different in Hollywood, and she pretty much brushed him off. But his advice to set her standards and stick to them before she went to the "Idol" finals "was what helped me the most as a teenage girl living by myself in a house with 12 strangers in Hollywood."

She went into the show hoping it would launch her on a big music career. She came out of the show thinking her lifelong dream had shattered.

"It was so overwhelming for me that I didn't want to sing after 'American Idol.' I'd given up," said Rasmusen, who's convinced the stress affected her voice.

So, she decided to chuck it all and go to Brigham Young University, where she started classes two days after the "American Idol" tour ended in the summer of 2003.

"It was a really great time for me to kind of relax and make friends. I didn't have a senior year of high school, I was in L.A," Rasmusen said. "I could just be a teenager and not worry about being famous."