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: [118, 100, 81, 27, 285, 272, 289, 217, 162, 196, 277, 171, 84, 113, 183, 298, 80, 28, 139, 77], k=9
A: 
118