A deceptively simple assignment for fourth-year veterinary students at the dairy: Assess the health and welfare of this population. For the Preventive Medicine Rotation, we visited Waterman Dairy and challenged students to assess specific health and welfare parameters of cows and calves on the farm, and then return to the classroom and use records from the dairy to calculate disease incidence. Epidemiology really does sound simple until you actually have to do it… Our goal with this exercise was to make epidemiology fun and a little less daunting as students worked through tasks as a team, giving them confidence to apply these skills in future practice.