Stamets got his mycological education not at Kenyon, which he left after one year, but at the Evergreen State College, which in the mid-1970s was a new experimental college in Olympia, Washington, where students could design their own course of independent study. A young professor named Michael Beug, who had a degree in environmental chemistry, agreed to take under his wing Stamets and two other equally promising mycologically obsessed students: Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott. Beug was not himself a mycologist by training, but the four of them mastered the subject together, with the help of
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