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.

[99, 239, 40, 23, 276, 132, 133, 119, 294, 271, 72, 49, 186, 282, 244, 236, 121, 167, 268, 170], k=18
276