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.

[116, 77, 23, 192, 244, 55, 15, 93, 272, 76, 252, 41, 34, 61, 139, 28, 43, 157, 50, 231], k=12
93