In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.

Example Input: [239, 110, 47, 43, 56, 185, 243, 72, 159, 130, 274, 122, 230, 148, 280, 296, 116, 11, 179, 294], k=1
Example Output: 11

Example Input: [49, 179, 198, 113, 205, 112, 80, 13, 57, 267, 226, 41, 15, 257, 173, 188, 144, 140, 183, 195], k=20
Example Output: 267

Example Input: [259, 161, 27, 153, 19, 36, 233, 25, 292, 137, 56, 65, 193, 171, 282, 114, 10, 108, 43, 128], k=17
Example Output:
233