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.

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

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

[69, 182, 35, 280, 130, 107, 92, 206, 24, 279, 188, 212, 278, 25, 127, 113, 105, 50, 169, 192], k=20

280