It is the start of my absolute favorite season of the year.

It is starting to get a little colder.

It is starting to get a little darker also.

And this just the crisp chill in the air.

It's like someone has cast a magical spell over the whole world. I love

fall. It's also when my kids go back to school, which might have something to do with it. God,

you know, I love them so much. I love them so much. Also, school is, uh, it's important for everyone's

sanity. So for everyone's sanity.

So for today's episode, we are talking about going back to school, including older kids, going back to their colleges.

Our place's editors, Michelle Cassidy and Jonathan Carey bring you two stories about two universities with very unusual rites of passages. One has a vending machine unlike any other,

and the other has a very strange tradition that goes back decades. Michelle, take it away.

Walking through the campus of Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and heart of hearing in northeast Washington, D.C., you might notice some small stone slabs embedded in the grass.

If you look closely, they bear inscriptions. Some simply have years, 1923, or the class of 1969.

Some of them have phrases carved into the surface.

Long live the spirit of 76, or we pave the road to success.

Some of them bear names.

There's Jane and Odysseus and Minnie,

and it's these ones that start to make it clear what you're actually looking at. They're gravestones. But not for people. For rats. For more than a hundred years, the first year students at Gallaudet University have participated in an unusual, somewhat macabre tradition called the rat funeral.

Okay, let's back up a little bit.

When Gallaudet first started offering college classes back in the 1860s, the school had a one-year

preparatory program meant to get students ready for a college education.

Students in this program became known as rats.

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