What are the steps??

Probably what it is showing is the 2 year program just for the nursing school. However, many nursing program have pre-requisites, especially if they are a BSN or ADN program. There are 3 types of nursing school programs, BSN, ADN and diploma. What type of program is the one you are interested in?

Once you get accepted, you have to undergo a background check and make sure all your vaccinations are up to date as well as have a current CPR certification and TB test.

Meeting with the counselor for your school is a great idea to get yourself on track to being accepted and ready to start.

Well the standard pre-requisites are Anatomy and physiology with labs, microbiology with lab, english composition, ethics, perhaps nutrition, developmental psychology, college algebra. Some of those course have pre-reqs of their own, such as biology 1 & 2 for micro and A&P, psych 101 for developmental. It's about 4 full semesters of a full time course load, though some schools allow you to be taking pre-reqs concurrently with nursing courses once you have your basic core curriculum completed.

It's most important to meet with the counselor so you understand what you need to do in order to be accepted into the nursing program, what their standards for admissions are for your GPA, whether or not you need letters of recommendation, etc.

Once you get your ADN, you can bridge with a 1 year program to BSN if you have all the of the classes neccessary for the BSN. Not all ADN programs require nutrition for instance, but most BSN programs require it. There is even a bridge directly from ADN to MSN if you want to go that route. "As far as you can..." go is going to depend greatly on what you want to be doing as a nurse. If you want to be a bedside nurse, most hospitals in Texas will hire diploma nurses, but in other states they require a minimum of a BSN. To be a nurse manager or educator at a hospital, you really need a minimum of a BSN, but some hospitals require a MSN. To teach at a school you need an MSN. The higest nursing degree is the doctorate, which would set you up to run a nursing program or be a director of nursing over major hospitals, or if you want prescriptive ability, nurse practitioner is the route to take. It's a very versatile field and it's going to greatly depend on what YOU want to do, and where you want to work.