On a clear March morning, a few miles north of the Minnesota-Iowa border, Ben Dentlinger stood in a dairy barn. A laboring heifer shifted her weight from side to side. Under the watch of Jeff Collins, a local veterinarian at Harmony Veterinary Clinic, Dentlinger and his classmate Boone Schmidtz set to work repositioning her nearly born calf. 

Dentlinger, Schmidtz and seven of their comrades—all fourth-year students at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM)—were on a calving call as part of a week-long immersion partnership at Harmony Veterinary Clinic. In its 14th year, the rotation, which focuses on beef production systems and cow-calf medicine, utilizes a collaboration between CVM and Harmony Veterinary Clinic. The partnership has given some 250 veterinary students in their final year of school a unique opportunity to get a feel for how their careers in the field might look, and gives them a chance to apply new skills and knowledge critical to rural veterinary practices. while applying new skills and knowledge targeted at a key component of rural veterinary practice.

“Having these partnerships in the field helps us know that we are actually targeting the right experiences and that what we’re teaching is aligning with what veterinarians are seeing in the real world,” says Tim Goldsmith, a professor in the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine and coordinator of the fourth-year clinical rotation at CVM. 

Goldsmith works closely with John Rein, owner of Harmony Veterinary Clinic, to plan each week-long session, including which site visits the students will do and what procedures they will be able to take part in. In 2025, Rein’s practice was recognized as one of the University’s Office of Academic Clinical Affairs Clinical Training Sites of Excellence. 

When the partnership began, the rotation happened just once a year, in the spring. Within a couple of years, there was so much demand that Rein and Goldsmith, who both graduated from CVM in 2001, added a June session for students at the beginning of their senior year. 

The future veterinarians—usually about 10 students in each session—are split into two groups. 

Goldsmith says that retired CVM alumni Lynn Aggen and Andy Overby were key in establishing the collaboration at the beginning, “with both their openness to collaborate as well as their time commitment.” 

Now, he and Rein are continuing that legacy, he says. 

For half of the week, one group of students works with doctors in the clinic, one of the few in Minnesota equipped with a haul-in facility for large animals and a tilt table, which allows veterinarians to carry out foot procedures more safely. The other group gets experience working on field activities with local producers that Goldsmith carefully plans before each session. These include bull breeding soundness and heifer fertility exams, as well as farm visits that range from commercial cow-calf operations to club calf producers. Then they switch.

Reflective of real-world animal care, “it's both structured and whatever happens, happens,” Rein says. “We're usually all ready to go with the day mapped out, and then bam, things change, and we have an emergency C-section.”

Patients include sheep, goats, pigs, horses, farmed elk, bulls, cows and calves, so students get to experience a breadth of procedures under the watchful guidance of Goldsmith and Harmony Veterinary Clinic’s staff and veterinarians.   

“We did whatever came in, and the vets were great. They asked us how comfortable we were with some of the scenarios and allowed us some great hands-on experiences,” says Dentlinger, who will graduate with his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree this spring. “I'm not one to just dive into something, but they made me feel like I could, and I'd be supported.”

Harmony Veterinary Clinic also provides a unique opportunity for cultural education. Fillmore County has the largest population of Amish in the state, and many have had a relationship with the clinic for years. 

“Students get a chance to experience firsthand rather than the perceptions or stereotypes of what working with this community might be like,” Goldsmith says.

At the end of each day, the students gather in Harmony Veterinary Clinic’s conference room to review the cases and activities they handled that day and debrief. Rein often carefully explains why a veterinarian chose the particular procedure or treatment they did.

“I like to show them that you're going to learn a lot at school, but things are often very different in real-world practice, and you have to think out of the box a little bit,” he says.