I teach them to develop patience, to be further accepting of rejection as part of the craft. What I try to teach them is that it is still an important pursuit. I believe that it is one of the more sophisticated ways in order to do your research, because you're really depending on the actual official records. You're not depending on someone's interpretation of them or anecdotal comments. You're not just chatting up somebody in order to get an opinion on what it is that's going on. You're actually dealing with that.
I teach them to be applied, but I will say that year after year, in the course of the three hours, we actually file requests with them, and in I guess the dozen or so years that I've been doing this exercise, I've yet to see one of them come back in anything less than about 90 days and with anything approaching something that we could convert into a story.
It's a frustrating thing. I think a lot of my students are “one and done” with ATI. That is a great regret.