Reddit reviews Russian Root List With a Sketch of Word-Formation

Sounds very similar to my story.
Came into college intending to just take a little Russian on the side while getting a chemistry degree. Ended up disliking the chemistry program and falling completely in love with the Russian program. Fast forward 2 and half years, I have studied abroad in Russia and have put in time towards studying Russian nearly every day since first beginning my studies back as a freshman.
Although I am still VERY FAR from being "fluent" (in the sense of feeling totally comfortable speaking and understanding Russian, as i feel with English), I am nonetheless able to read Russian news articles easily, and can read literature at a slow but reasonable pace (not understanding every word, but understanding most of what is going on), or at a slower pace I can understand it very thoroughly and even produce translations that I am proud of. It is still hard for me to watch Russian films without subtitles and demands 100% of my attention and mental energy, but I can do it and pick up a surprising amount of the language.

Before I began studying Russian, I thought that becoming "fluent" in a language was something very clear cut (I thought you were either "fluent" or "not fluent" with no in between), and I thought that with a couple years of dedicated study, fluency could be achieved. Now, I realize that both of these assumptions were entirely false. I hope to keep studying Russian for the rest of my life, and hopefully work in translation or interpretation if possible; and yet I know that no matter how much work I put in, I will always have more to learn and I will never be able to speak quite like a native speaker. However, despite this, studying Russian has been one of the most consistently exciting and rewarding experiences I have ever had. It has opened up new horizons for me both personally and professionally, and has simultaneously re-instilled a kind of naive wonder in the way we humans perceive the world, which I hadn't experienced since childhood when I was still learning to speak my native English properly. Working towards Russian "fluency" is an enthralling, never-ending puzzle that also has direct, real-world applications. It's so much fun; I wouldn't give it up for anything.

Edit: As far as learning techniques go, I would suggest that you do everything you can to get a ridiculously strong grammatical foundation before trying to do any serious reading or emersion-learning. Going over tables of noun endings and verb types and writing out your own examples 1000 times is extremely tedious, but every second of work you put into it pays off many times over. If you are able to reach a point where you can decline nouns and conjugate verbs quickly, in your head, with almost perfect consistency, it will eliminate a lot of bad habits and trouble down the road.
Also, in my opinion it is absolutely essential to start thinking about words - especially verbs - in terms of morphological components (that is to say: roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I suggest this book as a reference for that https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Root-List-Sketch-Word-Formation/dp/0893570524