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.

[68, 157, 264, 262, 59, 14, 61, 185, 287, 93, 20, 152, 172, 274, 32, 73, 31, 285, 222, 30], k=7
61