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.

[73, 55, 234, 249, 278, 48, 169, 163, 119, 225, 88, 286, 47, 285, 37, 248, 226, 23, 127, 187], k=10
163

[13, 163, 14, 96, 93, 58, 193, 71, 242, 264, 297, 237, 294, 299, 272, 118, 245, 131, 30, 172], k=20
299

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

253