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5-Question Profile for Mandy Gettler, Associate Director for CASLS.

1. What is your role at CASLS? What types of projects do you usually work on?

I am the associate director at CASLS. I manage communications, grants, financial resources, and personnel.

2. What are your areas of interest/expertise?

I am fortunate enough to work with inspirational, creative, and inventive people. My goal is to realize their ideas into something that can come to fruition – and then find someone to fund the work.

My expertise involves navigating layers of bureaucracy, managing financial resources, and following things through. I’m getting better at supporting my colleagues in ways that allow them to do their best work each and every day. I’m always looking for opportunities to insert mindfulness or folklore in my work life.

3. What do you like best about working at the University of Oregon and living in Eugene?

I adore my CASLS colleagues! They are the best and brightest in the field, and I am honored to work alongside them.

As a non-native Eugene resident, I appreciate the natural scenery and all that it offers: hiking, camping, swimming, mushroom hunting, and connecting with the sublime just outside my doorstep.

4. If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?

The ability to read faster. Is that a super power? If not, it should be. My list of books to read is too long! My life will never be long enough to read it all.

5. What is/are your favorite quote(s)?

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” – Albert Einstein

“When you come to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really, everything but our own thoughts and actions, when we lose sight of the higher aims of our life, and of our dignity as human beings.” - Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog

“What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I’m essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous – not in the sense of the small scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures.” - Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846, quoted in The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton