whether you need awk depends on what you want to after the assignment. If you want the variable outside the awk statement maybe using awk may not be very helpful. But, in situations , where you require processing data, this is seldom the case---you can do everything you want inside awk.
awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;++i) { print "Field " i " is "$i} print ""}' file_name for example prints out all fields, in all lines in the file