The youngest-ever Princeton student is notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Aaron Burr was thirteen years old when he matriculated. He went on to become a Revolutionary War hero, Senator, and Vice President. But he died destitute and forgotten, perhaps a victim, like generations of Princeton alumni to follow, of gifted-kid burnout.
In the intervening years, Princeton has been reluctant to admit child prodigies. Jasper Gebhardt, however, was only fifteen when he arrived at Old Nassau from Ione, California, a rural hamlet founded by his grandfather, to study mechanical engineering. “There was so little to do around me that I had to find and create my own things to do,” he said. “At a certain point, this accumulated into a resume.”
Homeschooled and without siblings, Jasper’s was a lonely childhood, saved from drudgery by his ravenous appetite for the way things work. Like the plucky protagonist of a children’s novel, he read every book in the town library, which wasn’t that many. He took apart old cars and excavated an accordion from a neighbor’s attic and won a slew of geography bees and wandered off into the nearby hills, armed with science kits from his grandparents, to look at bugs under microscopes. “I was very excited by the world out there,” he mused. “I feel like people stressed me out.”
At first, Princeton was intoxicating. “He was very humble, young, and innocent,” Jasper’s friend Jackie recalled. “He didn’t even have a Facebook account…Social life was very exciting to him.” Jasper became the president of Princeton Racing Electric, teaching students years older than him how to take apart cars. But the engineering path began to feel “stifled,” and the pressures of Princeton became unbearable. When Covid began, a still-teenage Jasper took an extended leave from school.
He had nowhere to go. Although he had “nostalgia” for Ione, his relationship to the town – and his parents – was complicated: his dad is local royalty, his mom a Korean immigrant in a conservative hotbed, forever an outsider. So Jasper moved to Orlando to be with his partner, Tim, a gun-control activist he first met online, and then in person, in a whirlwind romance defined by marathon conversations about esoteric philosophy and their remarkable biographies. “I was super off the wall crazy,” Tim confessed, “and he was down for the ride.” In Florida, they were broke, renting a room from an older gay couple, quarantined together on the precipice of the end of the world. Jasper worked in a UPS warehouse, then sold handbags for Coach and Kate Spade, then became a front desk receptionist for a defense contracting company. Intellectually restless, he assembled a project brief for an important client that made its way to the company president, who told Jasper, “That’s kind of weird that you’re a receptionist. Why don’t you manage projects?”
Jasper met Afghan refugees at military inspection bases, and then switched to construction management for Florida’s state parks system. But despite his rags-to-riches professional ascendance, he never abandoned the notion of returning to Princeton. Last year, ten years after he first arrived, he came back.
Now, Jasper lives with Tim in Spelman Hall. When I visited, the living room was littered with Tim’s paintings. Two black-and-white cats deftly navigated the cramped space, and the speakers oscillated between Doja Cat and Nina Simone. According to Tim, Jasper “can be really specific about the strangest things. He has a stick up his butt.” He doesn’t like the clutter in the apartment, and he would wake up at a regimented 7am every day if Tim weren’t there to wreak havoc on his schedule. (He may be a clean freak, but he’s also a “hoarder” – of, among other things, a Snoopy magnet advertising “Free Hugs,” a Dolly Parton votive candle, and tomes from Jung to Shakespeare). His thin frame belies his ability to put away food, which Tim compared to a “garbage disposal.” He is a maximalist in life as in learning and love.
At twenty-six, Jasper is no longer cowed by Princeton’s intensity. He is not so volatile. He wears button-down shirts and cooks Korean food with Tim. “I feel like as a kid, everybody was just telling me, ‘Oh, you’re amazing. You can do all these things…You’re going to cure cancer,’” he reflected. “And then you come to Princeton and you lose some confidence.” A newly minted anthropology major, Jasper now immerses himself in the way people work, a gifted kid turned gifted adult refusing to burn out.
