How to iterate over each element in a list?

I have a list of strings and I am iterating over each element by using a for loop, but it seems that what I am doing is iterating over each character instead of each element of the list. For instance:

names = list(input('Enter list of names:')).upper()))
result = []
for i in names:
   if 'A' not in i and 'C' in i:
      result.append('membership')
   elif 'A' in i and 'C' not in i:
      result.append('no_membership')
   else:
      result.append('unknow'):
print(result)

But what I am getting is a list in which the for loop is evaluating each character in the list of strings instead of each name. Am I doing something wrong in the code or do I need to split the elements of the list?