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.

[278, 41, 208, 239, 246, 23, 268, 17, 96, 253, 248, 177, 244, 15, 280, 60, 59, 257, 199, 123], k=13
244

[53, 280, 105, 133, 146, 112, 237, 125, 120, 263, 204, 149, 59, 117, 137, 130, 172, 206, 82, 94], k=3
82

[85, 214, 295, 30, 46, 220, 137, 193, 126, 68, 66, 110, 24, 209, 142, 125, 61, 273, 144, 246], k=16

214