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.

[11, 278, 43, 255, 83, 18, 268, 283, 288, 222, 31, 294, 17, 209, 71, 75, 57, 24, 91, 149], k=2
17

[94, 116, 256, 81, 106, 150, 29, 112, 198, 151, 85, 96, 138, 65, 219, 210, 266, 97, 134, 64], k=12
134

[175, 30, 11, 227, 144, 89, 93, 107, 103, 283, 100, 33, 186, 12, 75, 287, 206, 98, 87, 78], k=2

12