What you are attempting to do is called a symbolic or soft reference. There are hundreds of posts on Perlmonks as to why this is almost always not what you want to do. Basically, unless you know why you shouldn't do it, you shouldn't do it.

While EdwardG provided you a solution based on aliasing, the proper solution you are looking for is a hash.

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

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


foreach (keys %interest_expanded) {
        print $_, " => ", $interest_expanded{$_} , "\n";
}
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