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: [204, 41, 236, 97, 178, 250, 180, 257, 124, 120, 126, 265, 185, 152, 281, 233, 268, 283, 286, 71], k=17
A: 
268