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.

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

[261, 137, 226, 174, 152, 47, 248, 21, 250, 249, 211, 130, 135, 220, 110, 143, 259, 224, 106, 94], k=12
211

[91, 144, 89, 139, 171, 248, 268, 10, 70, 140, 112, 145, 182, 206, 37, 186, 263, 16, 198, 261], k=11

145