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: [42, 196, 182, 276, 226, 154, 296, 33, 167, 83, 36, 210, 112, 246, 149, 169, 159, 177, 84, 242], k=7
A: 
149