  Supersymmetric GUTs are the most natural extension of the Standard model
unifying electroweak and strong forces. Despite their indubitable virtues,
among these the gauge coupling unification and the quantization of the electric
charge, one of their shortcomings is the large number of parameters used to
describe the high energy thresholds (HET), which are hard to handle. We present
a new method according to which the effects of the HET, in any GUT model, can
be described by fewer parameters that are randomly produced from the original
set of the parameters of the model. In this way, regions favoured by the
experimental data are easier to locate, avoiding a detailed and time consuming
exploration of the parameter space, which is multidimensional even in the most
economic unifying schemes. To check the efficiency of this method, we directly
apply it to a SUSY SO(10) GUT model in which the doublet-triplet splitting is
realized through the Dimopoulos-Wilczek mechanism. We show that the demand of
gauge coupling unification, in conjunction with precision data, locates regions
of the parameter space in which values of the strong coupling \astrong are
within the experimental limits, along with a suppressed nucleon decay, mediated
by a higgsino driven dimension five operators, yielding lifetimes that are
comfortably above the current experimental bounds. These regions open up for
values of the SUSY breaking parameters m_0, M_1/2 < 1 TeV being therefore
accessible to LHC.
