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.

Example Input: [262, 175, 116, 233, 122, 247, 267, 286, 13, 74, 28, 145, 126, 205, 165, 259, 238, 76, 81, 177], k=9
Example Output: 145

Example Input: [209, 36, 151, 99, 21, 91, 38, 230, 289, 204, 33, 254, 278, 115, 137, 24, 76, 174, 118, 126], k=9
Example Output: 115

Example Input: [175, 30, 11, 227, 144, 89, 93, 107, 103, 283, 100, 33, 186, 12, 75, 287, 206, 98, 87, 78], k=2
Example Output:
12

