COLUMBIA — Nicholas Herrud's story begins the way many great ones do in Maury County — at Columbia State Community College on Hampshire Pike, as a first-generation college student figuring out what kind of person he wanted to become. Today, that journey has taken him from Middle Tennessee to the Baltic coast of Europe, where he is conducting research as a Fulbright scholar at Vilnius University in Lithuania while pursuing his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame.
Herrud, a Spring Hill native and 2017 Columbia State alumnus who graduated through the Tennessee Promise program, credits the college's small-campus culture with shaping not just his academic skills but his understanding of what education is actually for. He has pointed to the mentorship of retired English professor Dr. James Senefeld and Dr. Barry Gidcomb, Columbia State's dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, as pivotal influences. Gidcomb has said he and Senefeld have followed Herrud's career closely and consider him an example of what is possible when students stay open to where their curiosity leads them. After earning his associate degree, Herrud transferred to Austin Peay State University, where he completed a bachelor's degree in history in 2020.
What followed was an extraordinary sequence of choices: Herrud pursued a master's degree in Polish Studies, learning the Polish language while studying at Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 2020 to 2023. From there, he earned one of roughly 10 spots in Notre Dame's competitive doctoral program in history — out of approximately 250 applicants. Named a finalist for the 2025-26 Fulbright U.S. Student Program, he is now in Lithuania studying 20th-century Eastern European history and border interaction, a field he says he never originally planned to enter.