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: [155, 72, 71, 257, 17, 132, 266, 299, 290, 125, 38, 86, 37, 202, 185, 59, 70, 222, 145, 175], k=8
Example Output: 86

Example Input: [18, 299, 42, 255, 77, 40, 162, 199, 228, 168, 23, 212, 268, 283, 25, 217, 208, 247, 43, 92], k=14
Example Output: 217

Example Input: [200, 80, 13, 113, 23, 189, 255, 148, 239, 187, 233, 163, 88, 83, 164, 194, 252, 157, 291, 178], k=5
Example Output:
88