Student life is a most important phase in a person’s life to learn many things and to do different tasks. Students pursuing their education overcome a lot of obstacles created under many circumstances. Many adversities are faced by the students during their studies. Many psychological attributes affects the life of students, among them the present study deals with self-confidence and risk-taking ability of the students. Self-confidence means recognizing your abilities, self-interest, and being aware of your feelings. Risk-taking ability is one of the personality traits that may be affected by confidence. The aim of this study is to study the relation between self-confidence and risk-taking among the doctoral Students of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore (Main campus). This study was conducted using ex-post facto research design. Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore (Main campus). A total of 111 students pursue their third-year doctoral programme on the main campus and from them, 90 students were randomly selected for the study. The data was collected using a well-structured pre-tested interview schedule. Study revealed that the respondents had medium-level of self-confidence (77.78%) and risk-taking ability (74.45%). The two psychological concepts were also found to have significant relationship with each other and are also positively correlated. This proves that the students are adequately confident with whatever they do and are taking risks in most needed situations. The study also projected that students didn’t hesitate to take a risk because they trusted themselves in the career/academic process.

The main objective of the paper is to examine the effect of entrepreneurial characteristics on decision making process. The research was conducted with 120 entrepreneurs from sago cluster listed in Sago serve in Tamil Nadu. Samples were drawn randomly from the population. In this study the effect of entrepreneur’s characteristics were examined with formalized decision making process using multiple regression. The entrepreneur’s characteristics taken for the study were Risk propensity, Locus of control, Optimism, Competitiveness and Innovativeness. Results showed that entrepreneurs optimistic behavior predicted highest to the formalized decision making process.