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: [34, 225, 16, 48, 288, 69, 123, 61, 55, 221, 109, 165, 73, 32, 100, 44, 257, 223, 36, 169], k=7
A: 
55