One of the major energy consumers in any commercial building, in hot and humid area is the air conditioning system. Therefore matching between Air Conditioning (AC) systems strategies with the cooling load characteristic is crucial to ensure effectiveness. Previous researches have been done to determine cooling load characteristic for offices and residential buildings. However, same research for academic buildings is rare and still need further development. The occupancy schedule in office and residential buildings are significantly different with academic buildings and so does the cooling load characteristic. Due to that the paper aims to provide transient cooling load characteristic for academic building through simulation using TRNSYS. The results showed that the major contributor to the cooling load was heat gain from building envelope which was counted up to 52.57 of the total cooling load in a year. The result also implied that cooling energy wasted during peak and off-peak period was approximately 50 of the total cooling load. Once transient cooling load characteristic was presented, three possible solutions were applied to the system to find best solution in reducing the cooling load. The result showed that the AC system with adjustable room temperature set point would have lowest cooling load. This solution would reduce the cooling load by 27.4. © 2011 Asian Network for Scientific Information.