Instructions: 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.
Input: [101, 60, 42, 104, 107, 109, 273, 288, 64, 23, 144, 18, 298, 247, 158, 53, 145, 46, 155, 80], k=5
Output:
53