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.

[43, 55, 172, 198, 81, 270, 159, 285, 28, 15, 130, 245, 37, 134, 174, 39, 146, 94, 158, 82], k=2
28