COLUMBUS, Ohio — For most newspaper reporters, a few days to work on a story is about the most you can hope for.

The same has been true for me in my many years in the business. In fact, there have been a lot of stories I’d have felt lucky to have days — instead of hours — to spend reporting and writing.

So imagine my joy at being picked last year to be one of a half-dozen journalists to be part of the 2006 class of the Kiplinger Fellows in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University. We got to spend the first half of the year in Columbus working on our projects and engaging in other activities.

As part of the program, I had an office in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. It’s hard to imagine a more ideal setting to work on a project like the one I’d planned: Power Play, a more extensive look at electricity deregulation, mostly in Texas, but also in other states that had tried it.

As part of the program, we had several meetings with Senator Glenn, who personifies the ideal of the elder statesman. He was keenly interested in all of our projects: the erosion of the middle class, less-than-honest practices in the student-loan industry, problems with juvenile justice and others.

Glenn also was interested in electricity deregulation. He even knew arcane details about the Texas power grid.

And the school that bore his name also was larded with expertise. Just upstairs from my office worked Douglas N. Jones, an economics professor who had previously run the National Regulatory Research Institute at Ohio State.

Just down the hall from him was Andrew Keeler, a leading environmental economist who was particularly interested in the way coal-fired power plants would be affected by future environmental regulations.

And Ken Rose, another economist, was just miles away. Rose is now a senior fellow with the Institute of Public Utilities at Michigan State University. Austin and Knight Kiplinger, whose family endowed the program and which publishes Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, also took a keen interest in our work.

As I worked on my project, Debra Jasper, the program director and a veteran investigative reporter herself, was an invaluable help. Betsy Hubbard, the program manager, herded an unruly half-dozen journalists around the nation’s largest campus, and beyond.

The other fellows, Ann Alquist, now a Fulbright Fellow in Germany; Kim Clark, senior writer with U.S. News and World Report; Alayna DeMartini of the Columbus Dispatch; Eyobong Ita of the Kansas City Star; and Dave Knox, computer-assisted reporting manager of the Akron Beacon Journal, had to slog through numerous drafts of this project. Their input was a huge help.

Perhaps the best part of this life-changing experience, though, was personal. My parents met at Ohio State and both spent much of their childhoods within just a few miles of where I lived. Even now, they live a few hours down the road in the Cincinnati area, as do many, many old friends.

Thanks to the Kiplinger Program, I had six months to reconnect with some of the people who are most important to me.

I hope it was an opportunity to do some good work as well.