Why not consider using a hash? If I understand you correctly you want to assign to variables that have names you don't now in advance.

  use strict;

  my @interests = ( "foo", "bar", "blah");
  my %hash;

  foreach (@interests) {
    $hash{$_} = "My interest is $_";
  }

  foreach (keys %hash) {
    print "$hash{$_}\n";
  }
[download]

Hope this helps, -gjb-

Update: Thanks dragonchild for pointing out a typo (%hash rather than @interests in the last foreach)