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.

[217, 14, 159, 297, 144, 218, 15, 173, 258, 143, 154, 90, 132, 294, 284, 146, 114, 68, 237, 118], k=3
68