If you are going through college rankings, so one think i willl like to tell you that college rankings shown on different sites such as shiksha and career360 are not true, if you see the ranking of UPES in these sites then you will get to know that UPES did not come under TOP 100 engg. colleges of India (but it is fake), it is so because UPES do not give even a single rupee to these third parties for its publicity and for increasing rank, and on shiksha VIT has ranked 8 but you think yourself that, do VIT deserve 8 rank and SRM has been ranked 43 but one think i would like to tell you that UPES is far better than SRM in all terms be it academics,exposure OR placements and when it comes to flagship programs of UPES such as APE-upstream and Gas stream then UPES beats even some of the TOP ranked IITs,NITs and BITs.
UPES does not spend money on fraud publicity or anything like that which surprisingly is a pleasing thing to discover after joining the University. Yes, it is not good as private colleges like BITS or BIT-MESRA etc. but it is definitely better than most of the other private colleges like VIT, SRM etc which false their placements etc on 3rd party websites to fill in students.
Talking about the branches here, the flagship branches of the Petroleum and Earth Sciences department( upstream, geo informatics) and also gas stream and chemical department has great labs, faculty and a decent placement record as well.