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.

[27, 70, 212, 164, 256, 204, 25, 51, 31, 139, 22, 102, 160, 106, 15, 74, 177, 126, 223, 290], k=9
102

[288, 121, 80, 59, 294, 62, 131, 129, 122, 95, 275, 34, 202, 253, 86, 136, 236, 217, 174, 216], k=17
253

[33, 54, 96, 31, 26, 52, 86, 72, 203, 138, 258, 62, 262, 42, 222, 78, 45, 38, 80, 170], k=10

72