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.

[273, 12, 97, 267, 96, 60, 289, 95, 248, 120, 255, 275, 257, 122, 78, 191, 179, 167, 116, 79], k=16
257