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: [53, 203, 295, 77, 250, 297, 158, 172, 73, 64, 134, 175, 140, 135, 246, 270, 222, 98, 78, 31], k=17
A: 
250