House first attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate. Before fully committing to medicine as his discipline, he considered getting a Ph.D. in physics, researching dark matter. He was accepted to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and excelled during his time there. He was a frontrunner for a prestigious and competitive internship at the Mayo Clinic, but another student, Philip Weber, reported House as cheating off of him, resulting in House's expulsion from Johns Hopkins and rejection from the internship. While appealing his expulsion, he studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and worked at a bookstore, where he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy, with whom he shared a night where "he gave her everything she asked for"; years later, Cuddy noted that by that time, House, although still a student, had already become "a legend" due to his diagnostic brilliance. After the appeal process, he was denied re-entry into Johns Hopkins. During a medical convention in New Orleans, House first saw his eventual best friend Dr. James Wilson. Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time, broke a mirror in frustration and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox. Out of sheer boredom with the convention and to "have somebody to drink with", House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear Wilson's name (which he failed to do), starting their professional and personal relationship. House says multiple times during the series that he is a "board-certified diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology."