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: [176, 263, 284, 189, 131, 102, 40, 179, 289, 150, 209, 81, 114, 51, 162, 48, 66, 195, 49, 20], k=10
Example Output: 131

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: [99, 295, 16, 207, 25, 22, 262, 223, 54, 270, 85, 27, 112, 265, 109, 163, 210, 195, 20, 161], k=4
Example Output:
25