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.
Q: [113, 128, 35, 235, 243, 222, 247, 220, 150, 126, 105, 238, 293, 240, 81, 261, 191, 10, 148, 144], k=17
A: 
243