Subject areas such as sustainability and renewable energy design and enterprise were unheard of and you could fill your car with petrol for 12 cents a litre at the bowser.

Fast forward 50 years, and La Trobe University's Bendigo campus students are working on bioprinting skin and tissue for medical applications - and the price of petrol is now closer to $2 a litre.

Members of Bendigo's 1974 civil engineering cohort toured the university campus recently and while graduates have worked locally as well as all across Australia and the world, they were still keen to see the latest research in the field.

Chris Stoltz - who started at the university in 1969 - told the 1974 cohort that he was keen to show students and members of the public that engineering was "not all hard hats or hi-vis", and not necessarily about being on a construction site.

"Our whole lifestyle - from access to drinking water to having working telephones - depends on things being engineered, but we haven't been promoting our own careers," Mr Stoltz said.

He said he was also keen to highlight fields such as medical, agricultural and forensic engineering as some of the wide range of careers for graduates.

Lecturers such as Dr Vipul Patel took the cohort through how engineering degrees are structured - 50 years on from their own studies.

And while the scientific fundamentals clearly haven't changed, others things have.

Dr Vipul Patel explained there were now additional subject areas such as sustainability and renewable energy design and enterprise, as well as the university's strong work placement program and the new facilities built in 2019.

There was agreement that many people in the community do not know or understand what engineering is.

Professor James Maxwell said engineers were not looked up to in Australian society, in the same way as doctors and lawyers for example.

"We don't see shows glamorising engineers, there are shows about those who kill people but not people who built society," he said.

The academics told the alumni that 40 to 50 per cent of Bendigo GDP comes from manufacturing with many of La Trobe's research feeding into that work.

Dr Patel highlighted work with with beams and columns in building, while Dr Ing Kong presented her work on melting recycled plastics from agricultural waste - such as fertiliser bags, rope and salmon fishing netting - into cheap, ultra strong fence posts.

Dr Kong said her students were having discussions about work on dissolvable cardiac stents and dental implants.

Dr Maxwell told the graduates about other research which included sending fungi into space to observe the length of survival in the atmosphere, remote sensing projects and work on growing silicon carbide - a stronger alternative to carbon fibre which does not oxidise as quickly.

Dr Maxwell also showed La Trobe's former students a diamond anvil cell which could be used to "shock" diamonds to create a stronger lonsdaleite compound.