Indiana talent: plugging Indiana's brain drain with stars like Butler's A.J. Graves.

A.J. GRAVES HAS A WAY with numbers. Like 13.6, his senior-year scoring average as a star basketball player for Butler University in Indianapolis. And .889, his free-throw percentage as a Bulldog. And 46. That's the percentage of the employed 2008 Butler graduates who remain in Indiana pursuing a career. Graves is one of those who decided to stay.

Yes, the two-time Academic All-America honor squad member from Switz City could probably have built a career around his basketball talents. "Back in April, I was teetering back and forth between basketball and going out into the business world," he says. The business world won out. "I decided this was a better opportunity for me in the long run."

The opportunity that he landed was a job as a business analyst at AIT Laboratories, an Indianapolis-based independent reference laboratory, offering testing and research services. It fit with his mathematics degree, but also with his goals for the future. Instead of shooting hoops for pay, he's doing research and writing reports--and with AIT's help, starting on his master's degree in statistics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's one small step in the battle to keep the best minds from crossing state lines after graduation, says Dr. Michael Evans, CEO of AIT. The state's colleges and universities do an excellent job producing talented life-sciences graduates, he says, and "it is our mission to help stop the brain drain by hiring outstanding young talent like A.J." For Indiana companies, there are plenty more talented graduates where Graves came from. Of those who earn an Indiana University degree, for example, just about half leave the state to pursue a career, though Purdue says four out of five graduates stick around.

AIT is not Grave's first experience in Indiana business. On his way to pursuing a math degree, he dabbled in actuarial sciences and ended up interning at Conseco. Last February, he started looking in earnest for jobs, and found that it wasn't easy in the current economy. "I was open to many possibilities," he says, including taking a job elsewhere, though Indiana is really where he wanted to remain. "When AIT approached me to stay here in Indiana, Indiana was an easy decision."