A graduate of Notre Dame and Yale universities, Kersten began her career as a financial analyst for a Chicago bank.
She was a founding member of the think tank Center of the American Experiment and has written for publications such as Christianity Today and the Wall Street Journal.
[3] She supports ROTC programs at the U of M.[4] Before it closed in 2011, she was a strong critic of Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, which she argued was a religious Muslim school that should not have been funded by taxpayer dollars.
[6] She also opposes affirmative action for racial minorities and compared President Clinton's handling of the issue to "the Phil Donohue school of policy making.
[8][9] Kersten criticized then U.S. Representative Keith Ellison's calls for a United States Department of Peace, arguing that the idea was unrealistic in a violent world.