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