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.

Example Input: [95, 246, 215, 50, 209, 25, 114, 252, 164, 171, 33, 233, 59, 35, 99, 87, 285, 36, 226, 225], k=16
Example Output: 226

Example Input: [88, 138, 230, 71, 119, 274, 257, 233, 10, 293, 49, 245, 35, 205, 36, 161, 63, 147, 87, 114], k=8
Example Output: 88

Example Input: [297, 179, 276, 218, 102, 186, 299, 36, 42, 239, 73, 228, 124, 240, 166, 130, 167, 195, 255, 152], k=20
Example Output:
299