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.

[72, 285, 153, 18, 207, 96, 39, 37, 113, 237, 156, 56, 270, 134, 279, 32, 181, 211, 55, 17], k=12
153

[227, 108, 115, 232, 297, 144, 267, 88, 244, 91, 68, 114, 248, 180, 173, 219, 257, 66, 236, 197], k=17
248

[117, 183, 174, 274, 192, 42, 204, 260, 100, 210, 214, 136, 255, 98, 50, 235, 219, 277, 106, 186], k=16

235