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: [173, 71, 170, 278, 201, 293, 256, 208, 222, 192, 126, 277, 258, 70, 60, 284, 109, 156, 102, 219], k=13
Example Output: 219

Example Input: [42, 196, 182, 276, 226, 154, 296, 33, 167, 83, 36, 210, 112, 246, 149, 169, 159, 177, 84, 242], k=7
Example Output: 149

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