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: [241, 119, 166, 55, 225, 112, 67, 32, 47, 267, 129, 294, 69, 229, 174, 157, 286, 245, 101, 115], k=17
A: 
245